Council directs staff to develop citywide community survey; staff to work with vendor and return draft

The Leander City Council on March 6 directed staff to move forward with a citywide community survey, asking staff to narrow questions, add geographic identifiers to enable neighborhood-level analysis, and test the online instrument with council before full deployment.

Assistant to the City Manager Sereasak presented a trimmed version of a proposed survey. Staff removed questions not applicable to Leander (for example, beach-related items), consolidated duplicate items and proposed a short open-ended question at the end asking residents why they moved to Leander and what they would change.

Council members pressed for geographic segmentation so results can be parsed by area. Staff said the vendor (POCO) can provide location tracking by embedding a code tied to address lists or by including a question asking respondents to identify their area of town; staff noted the first survey round could be citywide and later one-off surveys could target specific neighborhoods or corridors.

Council members recommended the survey use region or quadrant codes tied to known municipal service/service-area boundaries to support analysis and follow-up. Several members also suggested replacing ambiguous references to “downtown” with “Old Town” or splitting questions so respondents who do not recognize local labels can still answer.

Sereasak said staff will work with POCO to build an online draft and distribute a link to council for testing; she expected initial testing to take less than 15 minutes. Communications staff will prepare outreach materials and a marketing plan to support responses.

The council provided no additional policy direction and did not require a formal motion; staff will return with a draft online survey and a plan for distribution.