Yesterday, Kansas City, MO released their 2008 Citizen Satisfaction Survey. There are several elements of the survey that are related to animals that I think are worthy of note. As pets continue to become a bigger part of the family, being an animal friendly city is important for the overal quality of life in a city. A couple of key stats:
Overall effectiveness of appointed boards and commissions: 18% approval (page 18)
There are a lot of boards and commissions, but the Parks Board, whether directly or indirectly got called out in this survey. 6 of the lowest 16 scoring points on the survey directly related to the Parks Board programs. Sometime, gosh, 20 months ago or so, a group of Kansas City residents approached the city about building an additional dog park for the city. They approached the city with a plan, a blueprint, a park in mind, and a fairly significant amount of private funding. Unfortunately, the parks board denied their request. The city council spoke out against the decision, which then led to the board assembling a task force to come forward with recommendations on where to put multiple dog parks in the city. We're now more than a year from the forming to the task force and we've yet to see recommendations from the task force and any movement on this dog park issue. This is about dog parks. How can it take 16 months to put together a proposal on dog parks? If every commission works so efficiently, I can see why this one is so low.
Quality of animal control -- 33% approval (page 23 & 24)
This number has been trending downward over the past 8 years...and still seems really high. But honestly, most people probably never give much thought to animal control. However, if more people knew that the city kills about 60% of dogs and 85% of the cats that enter the shelter, I'd guess this one would be lower. Tack on the reality that our response rate for emergencies in this city is 24 hours, it's pretty bad.
Citizen satisfaction with animal control in other Kansas City metro area communities ranges from 37% to 81%. KCMO's is 33%. Meanwhile, our competitive set of cities (regional midwest cities like Dallas, Minneapolis, Omaha, Wichita, St. Louis, etc) have a 60% approval rate for animal control. (page 74). Yeah, it is that bad.
Comments