The area’s happiest suburb is …

Happy Town is … Lenexa.

This Johnson County city achieved a higher average level of citizen satisfaction than other local suburbs, according to The Kansas City Star’s first-ever comparison of citizen surveys.

Lenexa residents gave their city the highest marks in the metro area in nearly half of the subjects covered in The Star’s comparison, from overall police protection to parks facilities, from clean streets to managing growth. Overall, 78.9 percent of residents surveyed in that city of 45,000 people were satisfied with all the lifestyle issues and city services The Star considered.

“We’ve very proud of that,” said Mayor Mike Boehm. “We’re being compared to other places that have excellent reputations in the metro area, and for our citizens to have a higher regard for us, that’s pretty special.”

Of course, Lenexa’s title is only honorary, and The Star’s analysis is hardly definitive.

The analysis used an increasingly popular tool by which cities are measuring themselves: the citizen satisfaction survey.

For the past few years, many suburbs have hired the same Olathe company, the ETC Institute, to poll their residents about how they like the city and how it’s performing. These surveys use a statistically valid sample of residents and generally ask the same questions.

Yet ETC does not compare one city’s results against another city’s. So to do that, The Star gathered these surveys from 19 area suburbs, from Platte City to Lee’s Summit on the Missouri side, and from Overland Park to Spring Hill on the Kansas side. (Some notable suburbs have not conducted these surveys, including Prairie Village, Shawnee, Smithville and Leawood, to name a few.)

The Star then compared city-by-city responses to 20 questions that encompassed the main survey subjects — public safety, parks, streets, leadership and overall perceptions of the city. Satisfaction levels in those 20 questions were then averaged to determine an overall ranking of citizen satisfaction in each suburb.

In the end, the surveys themselves were scientific, but the newspaper’s analysis of overall satisfaction was less so. (See box at right.)

Nevertheless, the analysis yielded several surprises:

•A couple of smaller Johnson County burbs beat out the higher-profile cities of Overland Park and Olathe. Mission ended up No. 2 overall, while Merriam was close behind at No. 4.

Merriam, a city of about four square miles and 11,000 people, topped all other suburbs in residents’ satisfaction with street maintenance.

“When a resident calls about a pothole or something, they immediately address the issue,” said Quinn Bennion, Merriam’s city administrator for much of this decade before taking the same post last year in Prairie Village.

•The top-ranked community on the Missouri side wasn’t a growing burb but a landlocked one: Gladstone. This Northland city of 27,500 people was No. 3 overall and earned consistently high marks across all categories, such as 83 percent satisfaction with snow removal.

“We give a lot of attention to quality-of-life programs — festivals, snow removal, a newly built community center, even programs for seniors,” said Mayor Les Smith. “I tend to think we’re very well rounded.”

•Generally, a high quality of life doesn’t necessarily translate into the happiest citizens. Local and national measures of “best places to live” routinely rank Lee’s Summit, Liberty and Overland Park as top local cities. But in terms of citizen satisfaction, Overland Park finished fifth in The Star’s comparison, while Lee’s Summit and Liberty ended up below average.

“We’re not interested in measuring ourselves against other cities,” Overland Park Mayor Carl Gerlach said. “We’re more interested in where we need to improve.”

For Overland Park, one such focus is managing growth. Compared to other suburbs, Overland Park residents gave their city a middle-of-the-pack rating for how well it’s planning or responding to growth.

“Part of that is, people like Overland Park, but they’re moving here faster than we can build the roads,” Gerlach said. “We have to manage that process better.”

On the whole, the overall rankings showed a wide variance in citizen satisfaction levels from the top to the bottom. While top-ranked places had, on average, citizen satisfaction levels above 70 percent, suburbs such as Raytown, Excelsior Springs and Blue Springs at the opposite end of the rankings had satisfaction levels about 20 percentage points lower.

Raytown received the lowest rating of any suburb in its efforts to keep citizens informed and in customer service at City Hall. And, indeed, neither Raytown Mayor David Bower nor City Administrator Michael Miller responded to repeated e-mail or telephone messages seeking comment for this article.

But while some cities might not rank toward the top overall, the survey results showed they still shined in individual ways.

For instance, crime is a top concern all across suburbia, and residents of Riverside in the Northland and Gardner in south Johnson County were most pleased with the visibility of police in their neighborhoods. Their 79 percent satisfaction level towered above a few suburbs with levels in the 50s.

In Riverside, a town of 3,000 at the bend in the Missouri River, such visibility is stressed by the police chief.

“That is precisely what our job is and exactly what we want to happen,” said Police Chief Greg Mills. “It’s just as important to be visible when they don’t call and to see people out working in their yards and stop and talk to them or wave to them.”

Likewise, a growing concern across suburbia is traffic congestion, but not necessarily in Grandview, in south Jackson County. Some 73 percent of residents surveyed there were satisfied with the traffic flow, compared with some places where the satisfaction level was mired in the 30s.

Grandview passed a transportation sales tax and bond issue more than a decade ago to help construct U-turn bridges at some intersections with U.S. 71, allowing motorists to avoid traffic lights when crossing over that highway.

“Traffic is sailing along now,” said Cory Smith, city administrator in the burb of 24,000 people.

Meanwhile, Lenexa shined brightest in issues related to parks. Its residents were more satisfied than those in any other suburb with the number of city parks, recreation facilities, even public swimming pools.

One popular facility is the Lenexa Community Center, where on Wednesday mothers and nannies pushed their strollers in so their young children could play with others at “Gym for Me.”

Next door at the senior center, center manager Steve Constance was preparing the tables for the January birthday lunch. The center is a haven for seniors who want to continue to attend dances, take fitness classes, even hit the casinos.

Over at Rising Star Elementary School, Tracy Wilkus was sitting in her car chatting through the window with another mother as they waited for their kids to get out.

As the mother of two elementary-school-age daughters, she relishes the many and varied activities that are constantly available in Lenexa.

“It’s sort of like an old-time community,” Wilkus said. “There are lots of festivals, ceremonies and family-oriented activities all year round.”