A happy bunch: Overall Olathe residents satisfied with city, with a few exceptions

When the city of Olathe is deciding how to allocate funds and make its priorities, one of the resources the city’s staff turn to is its quarterly citizen surveys. The results of last year’s surveys are in, and mostly, residents are pretty happy with the way things are going.

“When we know what’s most important to residents, we know how to invest their tax dollars. As a guidepost, I think the results are the way they are because the things most important to residents are the things we’re focusing on,” said Erin Vader, a spokesperson for the city of Olathe.

Conducted by the ETC Institute, the survey queried all different aspects of life in Olathe, from waste management to transportation to education.

The categories residents focus on the most spotlight traffic flow and congestion management, as well as maintenance of the city’s streets, building and facilities. Although 66% said they were very satisfied or satisfied with the city’s traffic management, 16% were dissatisfied, the highest such number in the major city services category.

Fifty-one% ranked improving east-west travel in Olathe as one of their top two transportation priorities for the city.

Current city projects aimed at improving those issues include work at 119th Street and I-35, Old 56 Highway and Lone Elm Road, Ridgeview Road between 143rd Street and 151st Street, and Woodland Road from K-10 to College Boulevard.

“The railroads are always a pain point, so that’s now in our (capital improvement plan) for consideration into the future. When we did the 127th Street overpass, which eased congestion on 135th Street significantly, and that was in direct response to residents,” Vader said.

On a scale of one to 10, 95% of respondents gave the city a score above five when it came to how likely they were to recommend it as a place to live, with 56% overall giving it a 10 rating. That puts Olathe ahead of the general metro area by 14 percentage points and above the U.S. national average by 24 percentage points.

One of the biggest gaps in satisfaction between surveys of Olathe and the rest of the metro area is in public education, where Olathe residents were more satisfied than the average residents of the metro area by 33 percentage points.

The city has been commissioning surveys for about 20 years, and this one compares how the data has changed since 2012. Citizen satisfaction with library programming has jumped in the last eight years by 23 percentage points for teen programs and 19 percentage points for adult programs.

Satisfaction with indoor recreation facilities and senior recreation opportunities has also gone up by 28 and 21 percentage points, respectively, since 2012. In that same time period, Olathe’s population rose by about 17,000.

Another point of pride for the city is its solid waste management, where more than 90% of respondents of Olathe were satisfied or very satisfied with the yard waste, trash and recycling services.

“Because we manage our own solid waste system, we’re able to provide standard of customer service that’s pretty hard to match, and we see that consistently in the survey that solid waste is at the top, year after year,” Vader said.

A continuing point of contention with citizens is the city’s code enforcement for mowing weeds and cleaning debris on private property, and exterior maintenance on residential property, with approximately a quarter of respondents dissatisfied.

Because of results like that, the city has worked to find creative ways to fix the issue.

“We saw a decline in satisfaction. When we started to look deeper into the data, a lot of that was concentrated in the downtown area. In that case, a lot of those homes were older homes, and so (we looked at) what grants or funding opportunities were available to help homeowners,” Vader said.

Because many of those homeowners were elderly and might have trouble with exterior maintenance, the city held an event called Rock the Block with the Kansas City Regional Association of Realtors.

The 2018 event brought about 100 volunteers to do things like outdoor painting and landscaping for free, which helped both the homeowners and other residents who had been dissatisfied with the appearance of nearby properties.

“Those are the great success stories,” Vader said. “We can be responsive and connect residents, especially those who may be in more need, with community resources and volunteers.”

This story was originally published April 1, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "A happy bunch: Overall Olathe residents satisfied with city, with a few exceptions."