Four-hundred Lethbridge residents were surveyed over the phone between April 7-27 of this year, and the results from Ipsos were presented to the city’s Governance Standing Policy Committee on Thursday.
The survey took about 20 minutes for each of the respondents to complete, and gathered public perception on topics including top-of-mind issues, quality of life, importance and usage of city services and programs, communication, the city’s customer service levels, and more.
Councillor — and chair of the Governance SPC — Belinda Crowson says council will consider the data when city budget deliberations begin in November.
“We will — leading up to the budget — have engagement programs just around the budget itself,” Crowson said. “So this is one tool, and I think you will find that every councillor will weight all those different tools differently.”
When asked what they felt were the most important local issues that leadership should focus on, 31 per cent cited social concerns, including 23 per cent naming homelessness.
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Transportation jumped to the second-most mentioned issue, up 12 per cent when compared to the last survey in 2020, with drugs, crime, and municipal service rounding out the top five.
When asked how they viewed their quality of life in Lethbridge, 90 per cent responded ‘good’ or ‘very good’ — that total is down four per cent from 2020 and eight per cent from 2014.
Of those who said their quality of life had worsened in the last two years, crime, the economy and COVID-19 were the top reasons why.
The city also saw a decline in satisfaction with municipal programs and services, with 82 per cent of those surveyed saying they were ‘very satisfied’ or ‘somewhat satisfied’ — that’s down from 86 per cent in 2020.
Ipsos identified police, snow removal and the maintenance, cleaning and upgrading of roads and sidewalks as primary areas for improvement.
Crowson says members of council will now have to sift through all the data provided by Ipsos in the months leading up to budget deliberations.
“The survey will take a while to go through because there is a great deal of information,” she said. “We know we’ve had two very difficult years through the pandemic and with the economy and all sorts of things.”
Full survey results are available on the city’s website.
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