March 2015

City Survey Results

l3wis March 24, 2015 15Comments

There was some interesting things to come out of the city survey (mostly commentary) but you can view all of the results HERE. But a couple of quick things I found interesting.

-People will always bitch about the streets. As I have said, they are a lot better then they were 4 years ago. I will actually give the city council and the mayor credit for getting on top of this. It also doesn’t hurt that the past two winters have been mild, which saves us money in maintenance and upkeep. Could the streets be better? Yes. I agree that the traffic light time in this town is pretty bad and needs to be adjusted.

-Affordable housing is almost non-existent. When I bought my home 11 years ago I was paying $450 dollars a month for a 1-Bedroom in Pettigrew Heights. I didn’t pay heat, garbage or water. It wasn’t a dump, but it certainly wasn’t ‘nice’ I have paid the same mortgage on my home since I bought it besides tax increases, but after I re-financed a few years ago to a 15 year mortgage, my mortgage went down. Let me put it to you this way, it is almost 30% cheaper for me to be making payments on single family home then it would be for me to rent a single bedroom apartment. Rents are way overpriced in Sioux Falls, and that is evident, when you see developers continually put up apartments. They are making a racket.

-847 responses out of 3000 sent for a response rate of 28.23%. The council hours wasted on this survey is amazing. I remember sitting in the outer council room while hearing staff and councilors drone on and on about how important this was for the future of Sioux Falls? We have video for those who missed it. So for the $29.52 paid for each resident return plus the thousands of dollars spent by the council in staff time and overhead did we learn anything we did not know already? If you look at one of the last documents in this survey, you will see the comparison to other years. You will see that there wasn’t that much change from 2013-14. That tells me that we can probably hold off doing another one of these surveys for a couple of more years, instead of every year.

But the most entertaining part was the open ended question responses. Obviously, most of these comments will be negative, afterall we are asking for the opinion of the public. Very little praise was given. But what surprised me was the high number of comments about our mayor pertaining to development, building entertainment facilities and the connections to Sanford. The SFPD isn’t seen in too good of light either.