2017 Rochester Citizen Survey

The City received a tremendous level of support and recognition from its community, as the majority of surveyed topics received significantly positive ratings. Some areas were truly outstanding though; with 93% or more respondents rating the City “excellent” or “good” in the following categories:

Quality of life
Place to raise a family
Image and reputation
Feeling of safety during the day
Quality of parks
Maintenance of public parks and trees
Quality of rivers and trails
Appearance of Residential Neighborhoods
Physical appearance of the downtown area
Availability of public library services
Law enforcement services
Fire protection services

Even the comparatively low sections were rated more positively than not, as every single section saw more than 50% of respondents report that section as “excellent” or “good”. As a whole, residents responded with overwhelming positivity in regards to their City and the community that it provides. Eight out of ten respondents rated the overall direction of the City as “excellent” or “good”.

This survey was designed to draw comparisons to the past survey that the City participated in back in 2009. Of the 33 categories that were directly comparable, 19 of those sections received the same or higher percentage of "excellent" or "good" responses in 2017. This survey also provided respondents the opportunity to complete open-response sections for each of the 13 overarching categories, providing more in-depth information about how participants feel about their community.

With nearly 1,200 responses from every corner of our City, the 2017 Community Survey achieved a 3% margin of error at a 95% confidence level. This means that based on the significant number of responses that this survey received, we can be 95% confident that this sample represents the entire community within 3% for each individual question.

More details can be found here.