City Council Study Session Agenda and Packet 2008 08 12

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City of Louisville Citizen Su August 2008 331-341). The method described in those publications is refined regularly and statistically tested on a growing number of citizen survey s in our proprietary database. NRC's work on calculating national norms for resident opinions about service delivery and quality of life won the Samuel C. May award for research excellence from the Western Governmental Research Association. The Role of Comparisons Normative comparisons .are used for benchmarking. Jurisdictions use the comparative information to help interpret their own citizen survey results, to create or revise community plans, to evaluate the success of policy or budget decisions and to measure local government performance. We do not know what is small or large without comparing. Taking the pulse of the community has little meaning without knowing what pulse rate is too high and what is too low. When surveys of service satisfaction turn up "good" citizen evaluations, we need to know how others rate their services to understand if "good" is good enough. Furthermore, in the absence of national or peer community comparisons, a jurisdiction is left comparing its fire protection rating to its street maintenance rating. That comparison is unfair. Streets always losc° to fire. We need to ask more important and harder questions. We need to know how. residents' ratings of fire service compare to opinions about fire service in other communities. A police department that provides the fastest: and most efficient service -one that closes most of its cases, solves most of its crimes and keeps the: crime rate low -still has a problem to fix if the residents in the city it intends to protect believe services are not very good compared to ratings given by residents in other cities to their own objectively "worse" departments. The normative data can help that police department - or any city department - to understand how well citizens think it is doing. Without the comparative data, it would be like bowling in a tournament without knowing what the other teams are scoring. We recommend that citizen opinion be used in conjunction with other sources of data about budget, personnel and politics to help managers know how to respond to comparative results. Jurisdictions in the normative database are distributed geographically across the country and range from small to large in population size. Comparisons may be made to subsets of jurisdictions (within a given region or population category such a~~ Front Range jurisdictions). Most commonly (including in this report), comparisons are made to all jurisdictions. Despite the differences in jurisdiction characteristics, all are in the business of proviiding local government services to residents. Though individual jurisdiction circumstances, resources and practices vary, the objective in every community is to provide services that are so timely, tailored and effective that residents conclude the services are of the highest quality. High ratings in any jurisdiction, like SAT scores in any teen household, bring pride and a sense of accomplishment. Comparison of Louisville to the Benchmark Database Normative comparisons have been provided when similar questions on the Louisville survey are included in NRC's database and there are at least five jurisdictions in which the question was asked, though most questions are compared to more than five other cities across the country or in the Front Range. Where comparisons are available, Louisville results are noted as being "above" the norm, "below" the norm or "similar to" the norm. This evaluation of "above," "below" or "similar to" comes from a statistical comparison of Louisville's rating to the benchmark. U L i 0 .~ z 0 0 N O of Results