Oswego residents rate village highly; traffic and finances top priorities

Jason Marado, director of community research at ETC Institute, presented the Village of Oswego’s 2025 community survey results to the Committee of the Whole, reporting that residents gave broadly positive ratings for village services and named traffic flow and the management of village finances as leading priorities.

The survey was a mixed mail-and-online random-sample survey of village households that yielded 606 completed responses, Marado said. At a 95% confidence level the results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percent. “We found that residents have a very positive perception of the village of Oswego,” Marado said during the presentation.

Why it matters: the survey is intended to give the village an objective measure of resident satisfaction with services and to help set priorities for the strategic plan and budget. Village staff said the results will feed into strategic planning this summer and then into the budget workshop.

Key findings

- Overall perception: About 87–88 percent of respondents rated Oswego as an excellent or good place to live and to raise children. The survey also showed increases in satisfaction across multiple years: Marado reported improvement in 68 of 113 comparable items since 2023 and improvement in 71 of 113 items since 2018.

- Comparative standing: Oswego rated above the national average in 55 of 60 service areas and above the regional average in 56 of 60 areas; customer service by village employees and overall quality of village services stood out as particularly strong.

- Top priorities: The items residents most often said should receive increased emphasis in the next few years were (1) value received for tax dollars and fees, (2) traffic flow and congestion, (3) management of village finances and (4) maintenance of village streets. On the item-level important-satisfaction analysis, traffic on major streets and water rates were among top maintenance priorities, and police visibility and crime prevention ranked highest within public safety priorities.

Questions and next steps

Committee members asked about methodology and subgroup breakdowns. Marado said demographic questions (race, ethnicity, age, gender and years living in Oswego) were included and that responses matched village demographics closely; he reported a roughly even gender split and near-even distribution across age brackets. He also said the survey team can produce crosstabs by age, tenure in the village, owner/renter status and other demographics on request.

Marado noted the survey included about 300 responses from outside the random sample (self-selected respondents). He said those are provided separately as verbatim comments and basic tabulations; they were not folded into the statistically valid random-sample results used for trend and benchmarking comparisons.

Committee members suggested additional analysis of open-ended comments (including sentiment analysis or AI-assisted summaries) and recommended sharing the survey results with the consultant doing the village comprehensive plan. Staff confirmed the intent to use the survey results in the village strategic planning process this summer.

Ending

President Coffman and several trustees praised village staff and departments for high marks on customer service, police and public works. The board asked staff to follow up with requested cross-tabulations and further analysis of open-ended comments to inform the strategic plan and budget process.