We finished the General Plan Resident Survey Report this morning and sent it to City Hall. The report is in two parts. Links to both parts should be posted on the City’s website later today. Look for the links on the City Council’s agenda for tomorrow’s meeting (December 15th).
Response Rate
Ivins received 2,244 completed surveys. That is an amazing response rate of 52.7%. That’s a great turnout and shows strong interest by Ivins residents in what’s going on in our city now and where are we going in the future. Our survey approach was to limit responses to one survey per household. Hopefully that didn’t create too many heated discussions. The reason for this approach was to ensure there would be no ballot stuffing.
Presentation Tomorrow
Patty will present the findings of the report at tomorrow’s City Council meeting. Please join us at City Hall or tune in on Zoom, YouTube, or Granicus. The meeting starts at 5:30 and her presentation is early on the agenda.
Granicus: https://ivins.granicus.com/GeneratedAgendaViewer.php?view_id=2&event_id=1084
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D05Tgf-q5M
Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82796293285
Download The Reports
Download Part 1 of 2: Survey Results
Download Part 2 of 2: Survey Participant Comments
Download Patty’s presentation to City Council
A Volunteer Effort
This was a 100% volunteer effort, done by 12 exceptional volunteers, without whom this would have been an extremely difficult and costly project. All totaled, the volunteers spent over 250 hours putting up/taking down signs, coding the surveys, inputting data, sorting, and proofing the results for 2,244 surveys which contained over 210,000 fields of data.
The volunteers who spent countless hours getting the survey completed: Lois Diehl, Sharon Gillespie, Sally Tom, Chris Haddad, Pam Gardiol, Lisa Ganz, Sara Dupre, Sharon Barton, Mike and Dana Cook, Jack and Jackie Sculley. City staff also provided invaluable help, led by Cade Visser.
In addition to the volunteers, Mayor Hart spent hours ensuring that mail treated as undeliverable by the Post Office got delivered correctly, opening and sorting surveys, and more.
Comments From Survey Participants
Almost three-quarters of the surveys included comments. I sat in a corner at City Hall talking to myself out loud for hours on end, dictating all the written comments on the surveys into a Word document (that’s available as “Part 2” of the report, a 100+ page PDF)
The survey was anonymous, so we do not know who made the comments, but we do know which of the 14 neighborhoods each respondent lives in. The comments are grouped by those areas.
These are presented as written, except for problems interpreting some handwriting and some garbled words in dictation. I tried to record the comments as written, with very limited changes for clarification.
The Word Cloud below shows what words or issues are most on peoples’ minds. It doesn’t show what they think about these words or issues though. That’s what the final report shows.
Why Conduct This Survey?
The city is updating the General Plan, which was last done in 2015. In January 2022, there were 6 community meetings to gather input from the residents about what changes they would like to see to the General Plan and share what is important to them about Ivins. The ideas that came from those meetings were summarized and presented to the City Council.
Although total in-person and Zoom attendance was close to 600 people, many attended more than one meeting and many couples attended meetings together. We estimate there were about 250 households that attended one or more of those meetings. Unfortunately, a lot of Ivins residents were unable to attend.
This survey, the first of its kind in Ivins, reached out to all Ivins households to get their opinions on important issues facing the city, and to better understand what’s important to its residents.
Neighborhoods
The surveys were anonymous, but we knew which one of 14 “neighborhoods” each survey came from, using the Ivins emergency areas. This gave us the ability to present both the survey results and participant comments by neighborhood.
Click here for an online version of this Google map that can be expanded for each neighborhood to show street names. You can also enter your address in the search box at the top of the online map to see what area your address is in.
The reports are bookmarked
The pdf files for both reports have “bookmarks” that allow you to click on a heading, and it takes you to the page. If you can’t open the pdf file, download a free version for your operating system of Adobe Acrobat Reader: https://get.adobe.com/reader/. How to access bookmarks using Adobe Reader:
- Windows PC: Upper left corner, “menu” icon (3 bars); “App Commands”; Upper right- “Bookmarks”
- Android phone: Upper right corner, “menu” icon (3 vertical dots); “Contents”; Click on “>” arrow next to heading to see sub-headings