High Marks Given to County's 'Quality of Life'
While residents agreed that the overall quality of life and government services in Platte County are exceedingly good, respondents to the County’s recently conducted “Platte Profile Plan Survey” expressed concern over traffic and road maintenance.
Conducted by the ETC Institute of Olathe, the survey counted respondents from 409 randomly sampled households and found that the areas of greatest resident satisfaction were in quality of life, quality of government services and quality of customer service from the county government. Respondents also listed safety improvements made to roads and bridges in unincorporated areas of the County, park maintenance and safety, disaster preparedness and environmental protection in the face of new development as priorities. Traffic related to development was also listed as a high concern among survey takers.
The county did receive low marks for its efforts to keep residents informed – 30 percent of the respondents said they were dissatisfied with current efforts. The current County Commission did away with their public information officer four years ago in a budget cutting move.
Local newspapers and newsletters far outpaced other forms of media when asked how residents would like to receive updates pertaining to the county. Forty-three percent of the respondents said local newspapers are the “best” way to receive information about the County, easily outpacing television (19 percent) and radio (7 percent); E-mail (27 percent) and websites (21 percent) also outscored television, radio and even public meetings (8 percent) in the survey.
The county commission is using the survey to guide their decisions as they work to draft a new plan for the county’s development future. A public meeting on the plan is scheduled for April and the Commission hopes to have a finalized plan in place by this May.