A satisfaction survey of Dallas residents yielded some telling results for City leaders, with more respondents signaling disapproval of the city’s trajectory than support for it.
More than 1,400 people were asked to log how much they agreed with the statement “I am pleased with the overall direction that the City of Dallas is taking” in the 2023 Community Survey conducted by the ETC Institute, which polls residents in big cities across the United States.
Excluding answers of “don’t know,” only 28% of poll respondents expressed approval of the City’s trajectory, while 41% disapproved, according to the survey results.
A breakdown of results showed just 4.4% of respondents said they strongly agreed, and 21.5% said they agreed. Meanwhile, 22.1% said they disagreed and 16.1% said they strongly disagreed. Roughly 30% of respondents said they were neutral, and 6.3% said they did not know.
Members of the Dallas City Council were informed of the results at a meeting on Wednesday.
“Overall, your satisfaction ratings are lower this year than your last survey,” ETC Institute Vice President of Community Research Jason Morado told the council members, per KERA.
Dallas residents’ satisfaction with City leadership has been on the decline in recent years. The combined share of 25.9% of respondents expressing their satisfaction with the direction Dallas is heading this year is down from roughly 53% in the 2014 survey, NBC 5 reported.
“It’s a pretty shocking decrease,” said Council Member Cara Mendelsohn of District 12. “This trends over time. You just can’t help but have it jump out at you.”
The survey also elicited a sense of what residents believe the City government’s top priorities should be going forward, with maintenance of infrastructure, police services, and traffic management ranking the highest.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, city residents have been subjected to drawn-out police response times due in part to a significant shortage of sworn officers. Resources are stretched so thin that the Dallas Police Department recently announced it would require certain “non-emergency” offenses to be reported online to utilize officers’ time more efficiently.
Respondents in the survey also identified what they think are significant problems facing the city.
“The items that residents felt were the biggest problems in the City, based upon the percentage of residents who rated the item as a ‘major’ problem, were: homelessness (75%), crime (61%), drugs (60%), infrastructure/streets (55%), and aggressive solicitation and panhandling (45%),” the survey report reads.
Dallasites shared a similar sentiment in polling conducted by The Dallas Express, pointing to homelessness, vagrancy, and panhandling as serious issues in the city.
Respondents looked favorably upon a potential solution to these problems that’s been successful in San Antonio, where nonprofit Haven for Hope has partnered with the city to geographically centralize homeless services into a “one-stop-shop” area.
In another poll from The Dallas Express asking the city’s eligible voters about their priorities, respondents said they most wanted City Council to focus on reducing crime.
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