Kāpiti Coast residents increasingly satisfied with Council performance

Satisfaction of local residents with the Kapiti Coast District Council’s performance is continuing to improve.  The results of the 2017 residents’ opinion survey presented at yesterday’s Operations and Finance Committee meeting show improvement in overall satisfaction for a third year in a row.

Feedback in the telephone survey of over 400 residents and ratepayers shows that 82 percent of those with an opinion were either satisfied or very satisfied with Council performance and its services and facilities*.  The satisfaction level is up from 79 percent last year and 74 percent in 2015.

Mayor K Gurunathan says that feedback from local residents and ratepayers plays a vital role in helping the Council ensure they’re delivering the services and facilities that are important to the community.

“We’re pleased to see growing satisfaction with our performance over the time that the Council has been focusing on customer service and being easy to do business with. Some residents, though, remain dissatisfied with services the Council delivers, and that is a concern for me,” says Mayor Gurunathan.

“We appreciate the time that residents take to share their thoughts with us and feedback, including from those less happy with us, is hugely valuable in helping us continue improving what we deliver for Kāpiti.”

Benchmarking measures in the report show the Council is performing well when compared with districts with similar characteristics, such as population size and density. 

“This year we’ve continued to seek detailed feedback on how we respond to enquiries.  The level of satisfaction in this area is steady, with people particularly satisfied that the Council was easy to contact and understood well their issues,” says Mayor Gurunathan.

As well as telephone interviews (via both landline and mobile phones) carried out in February and May, Kāpiti residents were invited to complete the survey questionnaire online. 

“We are continuing to work on building an online panel that matches the demographic make-up of Kapiti.  This will make it easier for more people to provide us with feedback on our performance.  Feedback and comments from all survey participants will be used in our work to improve our services.”

Other findings from the survey include:

• Satisfaction with water quality has seen another significant increase in the past year, up 13 percent to 81 percent.  This reflects the effect of the river recharge scheme, which has meant no bore water has been used in drinking water over the past two summers.
• The opening of the first stage of the Expressway has seen satisfaction with ease of movement on local roads bounce back from last year’s 6 percent drop, making a 13 percent gain to 74 percent.
• High levels of satisfaction with Council services such as libraries and swimming pools have continued, with satisfaction of 99 percent and 94 percent respectively.

Details of our 2017 residents’ opinion survey are available on our website.

*  Our survey uses adjusted satisfaction scores.  This is the percentage of people that are either satisfied or very satisfied as a proportion of those that expressed a clear opinion on the question.  People who responded that they didn’t know or are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied are not included in this measure.