OGDENSBURG — The city recently released its 2008 Citizens Survey, which will be used to inform management and budgetary decisions for the upcoming year.
"The results go to the department heads," said City Manager Arthur J. Sciorra. "We use the survey to help our planning and meet citizens' needs." The survey is part of a Strategic Management Plan, which is used to oversee, execute and inform the performance of the city government.
The survey was composed of 35 questions. The topics were sanitation, street lighting, parks and recreation, library, roads, code enforcement, public works, safety and fire department/emergency medical services.
Strategic Management Plans are created yearly to address measurable goals set forth by and for the city, and the Citizen Surveys are an integral part of forming the goals of both the departments and the city.
"Each department puts together a business plan focused on quantifiable goals," Mr. Sciorra said. "Then we try to integrate these goals to achieve the city's goals."
The survey was conducted by the city Planning Department, which randomly selected 418 citizens, about 10 percent of the population, to answer the questionnaire. Of these, 153 responded. This is almost 37 percent, which makes the total number of responders nearly 4 percent of the population.
"We feel this is a pretty good participation rate, although I would like to see it get up to 45 percent next year," Mr. Sciorra said.
A similar survey was used before 2003, but this is only the second year that this survey has been used.
"The reason we started them again was to create a baseline benchmark for ourselves," said J. Justin Woods, director of planning and development.
Since there are only two years' worth of results, no clear trends or patterns can be found, Mr. Woods said. "Maybe five years down the line we will be able to measure progress like that."
The feedback from the survey was mostly positive. Eighty-six percent rated the city as either very clean or fairly clean and 79 percent said yard collection was either excellent or good. Eighty-nine percent indicated Fire Department services were excellent or good and 97 percent said the library's availability and selection was either excellent or good.
On the other side, 84 percent felt the city's streets had either a few or many bad spots, and 56 percent felt dilapidated houses were a problem.
The next step for the continuing Strategic Management Plan is to prepare department budgets, and business and capital improvement plans. This includes establishing department objectives and performance measures.
