March 18, 2024

Citizens feeling safer in Newton, survey reveals

Results from the 2016 Community Attitude Survey show citizens find Newton a safer community than two years ago. More than 600 citizens participated in the bi-annual survey conducted by the city to gather data to update the city’s comprehensive and action plans.

“Surveying residents helps to measure the city’s performance and also highlights areas that may need increased focus or resources,” senior management analyst Natalie Umsted said. “When we passed the action plan in 2015 we identified some indicators from our 2014 survey, areas that we were wanting to see improvements.”

The survey covered the four essential purposes the city identified in its recent action plan. Those include providing a safe community, encourage economic development, foster a high quality of life and have an effective, efficient, democratic governance.

Providing a safe community

The city’s purpose is to protect the community and to fairly enforce the law, to educate the residents and to provide information on safety prevention, to be well prepared in order to promptly respond to emergencies and calls for service, to provide the protections of the environment and the lives of its residents and visitors and to provide a safe transportation network that is well-maintained.

“This is one of the areas that we really excelled for the past two years. In each of the indicators we showed improvement in terms of the percent of citizens rating our services positive,” Umsted said. “I think it shows that citizens are feeling like Newton is a safe place to live and that is exactly what we want.”

In the area of police services, the department earned a 78 percent good or excellent rating, up 12 percent from 2014. Also, those rating the services fair or poor dropped 12 percent from last survey.

Newton’s fire services also received positive ratings gaining 6 percent in the excellent category and dropping 6 percent for fair ratings. The NFD maintained a 0 percent poor rating from 2014 to 2016.

The survey also received results on the overall feeling of safety, EMS services, crime prevention, traffic enforcement and animal enforcement. In every category surveyed, the city had positive growth from the 2014 survey.

Encourage economic development

The city’s purpose is to build a strong economic base with high-quality jobs. To help accomplish the goal, the city is working to create a vibrant downtown, attracting business growth around the interstate interchanges, assisting local businesses with expansion and growing the population and strengthening the community by attracting young families and retaining existing residents.

“Shopping opportunities is the one area under economic development where we did fall but for the most part we also saw really positive feedback in the encourage economic development category,” Umsted said. “The percent positives are as not as high as public safety, but it is good to see positive growth between 2014 and 2016.”

While the shopping opportunities percentage did fall a few percentages, the amount of people rating the direction Newton is taking as excellent doubled from 5 to 10 percent.

“Survey data from 2012 showed 13 percent agreed or strongly agreed that Newton is a place with a bright economic outlook. That number increased pretty drastically from 2012 to 29 percent in 2014 and in 2016 stayed pretty consistent at 27 percent,” Umsted said. “When you break it out by citizens ages, you can see that citizens aged 18 to 34 are rating Newton with a place with a bright economic outlook at a higher rate than their older peers. As we think about some of the goals we set as a community of attracting younger families I thought that was an interesting thing to pull out.”

The city also made positive strides in the areas of quality of businesses and services, vibrant downtown, Newton as a place to work and quality of new development.

“I thought it was nice to see such as wide range of ages participating,” councilwoman Miranda Kulis said. “Nobody really stood out to me as one group that participated — along gender lines and demographics, financial and economic, it was very wide spread. Thank you to the community for participating.”

Friday’s Newton Daily News will explore the survey feedback on the final two essential purposes, fostering a high quality of life and an effective, efficient, democratic governance.

To view the survey in its entirety, visit the city's website at www.newtongov.org.

Contact Jamee A. Pierson at 641-792-3121 ext. 6534 or jpierson@newtondailynews.com