The Community Satisfaction and Budget Priority survey found that the top five investment priority areas for San Antonio residents were streets, homeless encampment cleanups, services to assist the homeless, sidewalks, and police services.
City Manager Erik Walsh said the surveys will be part of what guides the city council’s decision on the Fiscal Year 2025 budget, which will be passed this fall and begin in October.
The top five investment priority areas last year were homeless encampment clearings and services as one item, followed by streets, affordable housing, Animal Care Services, and police.
The investment priority area rankings are made up of resident responses to two different questions about a list of city services — how important they are, and how much they’re needed. For example, a resident may say that parks and recreation services are very important, but because they’re satisfied with those services, they may not rank them highly on whether they’re needed.
The survey also found that a record high 87% of city residents were satisfied or very satisfied with city services. That satisfaction ranking put San Antonio far above Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and El Paso’s resident satisfaction ratings.
The residents’ grades for the city’s customer service and overall quality of services also neared 90%, and were more than double the national average for large cities.
Ryan Murray, the assistant director of community research at ETC Institute, which conducted the survey, said satisfaction with the city increased across the board.
“When we talk about top increases, we had 25 areas that were directly comparable to the 2022 results, and of the 25, 21 saw improvements,” Murray said.
Satisfaction increased most with the city’s Public Works Department, which had a satisfaction rate 23.9% higher than in 2022.
The four city services where resident satisfaction decreased were Animal Care Services, fire and EMS response times, fire and EMS preventing fires and offering education, and the condition of streets. Satisfaction with the condition of streets dropped the most, by 4%.
The ETC Institute broke the homelessness question into two with this year’s survey after suggestions from the city council who said it would give them a better idea of what exactly residents wanted.
Walsh said even though clearing homeless encampments had dropped slightly on the survey this year, the city wouldn’t change course on its aggressive approach.
“We’ve surpassed this year’s goal [for encampment clearings], we will surpass it,” Walsh said. “I can’t imagine we would ease up at this point.”
While police services remained in the top five of the investment priority areas, residents ranked police 14 out of 20 for city services they believed were most needed.
District 2 Councilmember Jalen McKee-Rodriguez seized on that information to suggest the city could find savings in SAPD as it anticipates multimillion-dollar deficits in the next two years if nothing changes.
“We are going to be adding 260 police officers over the next four years,” he said. “What if we added those officers over five years?”
He said city staff have said that kind of scheme could save $11 million to $12 million.
“We can’t find that savings in any other department,” McKee-Rodriguez said. “I’m interested in hearing from colleagues where else we can find some savings, because it sounds based on this conversation that we’re going to need to find some.”
1,083 residents responded to the statistically significant survey with at least 100 from each council district. The margin of error was 2.98%.
