City Council, staff review results from countywide budget survey

“We conducted quite a few marketing and outreach efforts to inform people the survey was taking place and get as many respondents as possible,” City Management Analyst Brannen Moan said. “This included social media posts every Friday to both the city’s Facebook and Instagram, articles in several news outlets. We had radio ads running throughout the course of this and we collaborated with a number of community partners.”

Survey data collection occurred during an eight-week period from Dec. 21, 2023 through Feb. 15. The survey consisted of four questions; two focused on allocation of resources, one dedicated to budget balancing and one open-ended question.

The survey received 723 submissions with city staff implementing a new deduplication process. It factors in digital fingerprints for browsers and IP addresses to ensure there were only one submission per browser and device. The final number of submissions was then whittled down to 572 with 151 entries being duplicates.

Vice Mayor Sharon Cumbie wondered if there were households with two individuals who used the same computer and each submitted separate responses, would the deduplication process be able to tell the difference or would one response be thrown out?

“If that were the case, then they would only be able to respond once with that device,” Moan said. “That is why going forward we would like to do a kiosk system in public buildings (to help) if there are a limited number of devices in a household. I think that would be a great opportunity to circumvent that kind of thing, but at this time the deduplication would remove it if it was from the same device.”

Survey results

Out of 572 responses, 498 were Laramie residents and 74 were Albany County residents with nearly 50% of respondents having lived in Albany County for more than 20 years.

In the first question there were 13 city services provided and residents were asked to rank them from most-to-least important. Public safety services and drinking water were ranked highest, followed by wastewater and stormwater. Winter road maintenance and economic development were ranked in the middle, and road maintenance and construction were placed lowest.

The second question asked how residents would allocate funds to the 17 listed programs. In contrast to the results of the first question, street and alley maintenance were chosen to receive the most funding, followed by emergency services and preservation of water resources. Nuisance code enforcement, fostering a sense of community and beautification to entryways and public areas were designated the least.

Survey takers also were asked how they would prefer the city to pay for increased cost in goods, services and labor. The addition of a seventh-cent sales tax was ranked as the best option, followed by increasing user fees and reducing services. Drawing from reserve funding was ranked the lowest.

The open-ended question asked residents to describe other city services or programs that they found important. The most common responses were housing, infrastructure, sidewalks and transportation.

Room for improvement

This was the first fully digital budget survey. There were suggestions and complaints that were noted by staff for future surveys.

Staff suggested demographic questions should be vetted with census data ahead of survey publishing, earlier planning on outreach, more cooperation with community organizations and broadening demographic response options.