Mixed grades in Dallas resident service satisfaction survey

The results are in from a Dallas resident service satisfaction survey and they have city leaders concerned.

About two-thirds of residents rated their neighborhood as a good or excellent place to live. But only 28% said they are pleased with the overall direction the city is taking. That’s down from 53% in a 2014 survey. The number has been steadily falling in four past surveys.

“It’s a pretty shocking decrease,” City Council Member Cara Mendelsohn said. “This trends over time. You just can’t help but have it jump out at you.

Dallas City Council Members Wednesday received a shorter 28-page briefing on the larger 180-page report. Click here to read the briefing and click here to read the full report. Both are at the bottom of this article.

There are differences of opinion between city leaders and survey respondents on what the priorities should be.

Jacob Rosario lives beside one of the many potholes on his street in Oak Cliff. His street has an "F" pavement quality rating, one of many in Dallas.

“It's like straight driving off-road. It's like, 'boom, boom.' It just goes up and down man. Every time you drive here, it’s like another road bump in the road,” he said.

Rosario said he strongly agrees with the community survey in which 59% of respondents ranked infrastructure, like streets and sidewalks, as the number one resident priority.

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson did not include that in his top three priorities for his next four years in office in his inaugural address Tuesday.

“If Dallas residents don't feel secure, our city's other objectives are guaranteed to fail,” Johnson said.

The number two priority in the resident survey was police. The survey also found satisfaction with Dallas police service has fallen over the past five years.

“Constituents are going to have to start reporting online and I'm getting too many calls about slow response, no response,” Council Member Carolyn King Arnold said.

Only 24% of residents in the survey said they get good value for their tax money. That is down from 45% in 2016.

“This is a mandate to change how we are spending our dollars and what we are spending them on,” Mendelsohn said.

Other members found positive points in the survey, including 61% of respondents saying city employees provided good customer service.

“I just want to say thank you to our city staff who are leaving this kind of impression with our citizens,” Council Member Gay Donnell Willis said.

Dallas was ahead of other cities in many ratings, even though there was a decline compared with past Dallas surveys.

“We need be thinking about how we want to address some of these, budget versus bond,” Johnson said.

Right now the city is preparing a new budget that could help improve police funding, and a 2024 public improvement bond referendum that could help fix more streets.

“You go to some suburbs it's like very nice, it's all the same level,” Rosario said. “They could definitely fix up the roads.”

But Johnson also includes better parks and property tax rate reduction in his top three priorities.

Doing all of it will be very tough, which is how big city Dallas wound up in this survey spot.

The community survey was conducted by the ETC Institute, which does them for many large cities.

More than 1,400 Dallas residents from all city council districts participated in the survey.