Boulder City Council kicked off its official business for 2024 on Thursday evening with discussions about the city’s recently released community survey results and the Facilities Master Plan.
Boulder released the results of its 2023 community survey last week. It was the first community survey the city has done since 2018, with 2020 and 2022 being skipped due to the pandemic.
The most recent results show a trend of declining satisfaction with government services since five years ago, a trend the city says is not unique to Boulder. In the most recent survey, 85% of respondents rated their overall quality of life in Boulder as either “excellent” or “good,” down from 92% in both 2018 and 2016.
City officials have said the survey paints a broad picture of how Boulderites rate the city on issues such as the quality of life, cost of living, ease of getting around town and availability of affordable housing. But council members’ discussion Thursday of the survey results highlighted some potential gaps and limitations in the data that may make the survey a less-than-reliable litmus test for how the entire community feels and what the city most needs to prioritize.
Council members were generally in agreement that the survey provides useful information, but some questioned how valuable and meaningful it is to ask residents their level of satisfaction without knowing the context of why they feel that way. The survey only asks respondents to rate their level of satisfaction with various aspects of life in Boulder — it didn’t offer a way for them to elaborate on their answers.
As a next step, Boulder spokesperson Sarah Huntley suggested using the survey results to conduct more focused community engagement to better understand why people provided the ratings they did and what the city can do to improve.
Several others on the council were also concerned about whether the survey was administered equitably. Councilmember Mark Wallach commented that the survey was lengthy and said he wondered if the results could be biased because most people who responded may have had more free time to answer that many questions.
Meanwhile, Councilmembers Taishya Adams and Lauren Folkerts expressed worry that the survey results only capture the feelings a particular cross-section of Boulder residents and that they may not do a good job of representing people from marginalized communities.
“If we’re talking about a community survey … I want to see all of the dimensions of our incredibly rich and dynamic community. Their voices are valued and necessary,” Adams said. “To have this presentation start off with (how) Boulder is the happiest place (to live) … there is significant over-representation in the data. There’s only 17 Black people who responded between the open survey and the statistical survey,” Adams said.
Said Folkerts, “I don’t feel like we can go forward with a lot of confidence with some of the gaps that I feel like these (results) have … I wouldn’t want us to move forward with a level of overconfidence that could end up in trouble based on the information. I think we should be honest with ourselves about where the strengths in this lie and where we still need to fill in to create a higher level of certainty.”
Another item on Thursday’s meeting agenda was a discussion of the city’s Facilities Master Plan. The purpose of this presentation was less to present new information than it was to bring all council members up to speed and answer any questions they had.
Some of the major themes of the input council offered included concerns about how much it’s going to cost Boulder to fully implement the Facilities Master Plan, praise for the sustainable deconstruction efforts at the Alpine-Balsam site and questions around what potential public-private partnerships might look like for the city.
