The vast majority of registered Corvallis voters help their neighbors, trust City Hall, are satisfied with city services and believe the city is a good place to live. But those same people warn that the availability of affordable quality housing, employment, shopping opportunities and availability of affordable quality child care are problem items.

This is the first year since the city began taking an attitude survey in 1993 that an outside company was contracted to complete the study. City Manager Jon Nelson said past surveys compared the city to itself from year to year, while this one rates citizen attitudes nationally and regionally.

“We’re going to be spending a lot more time with it from a staff perspective and hopefully from a policy perspective as we march into 2009,” Nelson said.

Boulder-based National Research Center conducted the study and offers comparison to 500 other cities in its national database of citizen surveys. These “benchmark comparisons” were tallied whenever a similar question had been asked in at least five other city surveys.

Overall, more than 100 questions were compared with responses from western cities and cities nationally with populations from 35,000 to 70,000.

The survey found that many people in Corvallis are pleased with the city in general. For example, 90 percent rated Corvallis quality of life as excellent or good and 91 percent were very or somewhat likely to recommend living here to someone else.

A majority of survey respondents rated the overall direction of city leadership as good or excellent, higher than the benchmark of other communities. Those residents who had interacted with a city employee in the last year gave high marks to those employees, rating their overall impression of employees as excellent or good.

Easy bicycle and walking access were the highest-rated transportation topics, attitudes that ranked above national and regional averages, although 46 percent of respondents reported commuting daily in their own car.

The survey showed Corvallis ratings as lower than national and Western benchmarks for the variety of available housing, but similar to comparably sized communities.

Additionally, 34 percent of respondents reported housing costs here as costing more than a third of their income. That statistic was described in the survey report as an indicator of housing cost stress.

Read the full report.

Matt Neznanski can be reached at 758-9518 or matt.neznanski@lee.net

SURVEY RESPONSES

The following responses were taken from the survey’s open-ended response section. They were taken verbatim from the response forms and have not been edited.

On economic issues

• Shopping opportunities — the lack of stores and the lack of competition among those that are in Corvallis has motivated me to spend up to 60 percent of my shopping dollars in other communities.

• Focus on downtown development in the area of high quality urban atmosphere, shops, restaurants, housing, etc. Keep the “Albany” type development in Albany i.e. 9th St. is ugly; downtown is not.

• I’m a student. I love it here but I plan to move out after school.

• As the economy sours, it would be good to amend city code to encourage small animal husbandry (i.e. several goats if have over 1/4 acre of pasture for them).

On transportation

• I would like to see the city gov. put even more time/energy/money towards bicycle infrastructure such as education (for drivers and riders) and separate bike paths not on the sides of roads.

• Regarding city transit: I would use buses more often if they ran later and more often. Yet, I’m grateful for the routes we have.

On governance

• I am very concerned about my property taxes so I would like you to find other sources of funding.

• Please do not waste time on making national level “opinions” from a small vocal group. Stick to city & county level challenges only.

• I appreciate city council stands on national issues — we get some voice.

On law enforcement

• If you live close to campus, the state police respond rather than Corvallis police. The Corvallis police department does a much better job than the state police!

• The police are fairly aggressive with traffic tickets. But, I almost never see the police walking a “beat” in the downtown area on a Friday night.

On other items

• Control cats like you do dogs.

• Envelopes in city utility bills. They don’t have to be pre-paid or anything, but it would be nice not to have to write the address every time.

• A few people run most everything.

• Overall I have been extremely pleased with the city of Corvallis and the services offered. This has impacted my decision to stay here.