If Geauga County residents want to have a collective say in the future of their park district, now is their chance.
As Geauga Park District officials work on a new strategic plan, gathering community input via a new survey is an integral part of the process, said Matt McCue, interim director of planning and operations at the park district.
“This survey was identified as part of the community input the park district wanted to garner when developing a new strategic plan for 2015-2025,” he said via email response. “The current strategic plan was for 2009-2014.”
The survey, posted online at http://bit.ly/gpdsurvey201, will help gather information about needs, interests, issues, concerns, value, users/non users and perceptions, McCue said.
“The planning process also involves the review of current plans, looks at critical issues and trends affecting the county, identifies long-term natural resource management issues and needs, identifies future operational needs of the park district, as well as evaluates current and future commitments of the organization,” he said. “There are many pieces that factor into developing a long-range plan that will help identify the priorities of the park district going forward. Again, the community survey is one piece of the puzzle.”
The survey is being offered now through March 31 and is limited to only being taken once per computer.
The park district also asks that adults limit their participation to one response. Households with multiple adults, but only one computer, can request a paper copy of the survey by calling 440-286-9516.
This is not the first survey of its kind done, McCue said.
In 2008, a phone survey of 400 people was done to assess voters’ opinion of the park district on matters such as frequency of park use and preferences; reasons for visiting or not visiting a park more often; measuring support for several proposals that could improve quality of parks; exploring residents’ attitudes toward park development and land management; and determining where residents get their information about the parks.
“(It was) similar to some of the themes in the current survey. However, this is the first online survey of this scale the park district has undertaken,” McCue said, adding the goal is to have the strategic plan completed by the end of the year.
The park district hired an outside market research firm — Triad Research Group, of Westlake — to review, analyze and report the final survey results, he said.
“The computer does a lot of it,” said Kathy Severinski, Triad’s president and a principal of the firm, Monday.
She said the computer will look at IP addresses to make sure a computer doesn’t show up multiple times.
“(The park district) will allow two responses per household. We programmed the computer to look for that,” she said, adding they will also be looking closely at results from community computers, such as the library or a company computer.
To date, instances of duplication have been few, McCue said.
Since last week, they’ve had more than 900 responses, Severinski said.
“Which I think is a pretty nice response,” she added.
Once all results are in and the filtering out of duplicates is done, Triad Research Group will then analyze the data, Severinski said.
“We’ll run tables and cross tabs to analyze data. We’ll look at a demographic profile,” she said, adding they will have information on the city, township, village and age of the survey takers, and will be able to compare all of that information with the Census data.
They will also look at the survey data from 2008 “just to make sure the residents this time are represented as they should be across the county,” she said.
Hard copies of the survey have been made available to 41 bishops in the Amish community, McCue said, adding copies of the survey are also available at the libraries throughout the county for people who don’t have online access, and also can be requested by contacting the park district.
The new strategic plan that results, a compilation of the survey and other compiled data, will serve as a guide for how park district policy, operations, programming and capital improvements can meet the changing needs of the county and its residents, he said.
“A strategic plan is a working document,” McCue said. “It is not an end in itself, but a way to organization priorities and objectives for the future and to help identify strategies to achieve them.”
The community survey can also be accessed under the “What’s New” tab on the park district’s website, www.geaugaparkdistrict.org.