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Vision 2050: Consultant presents public survey tool and finds housing, childcare and education near top of residents’ priorities
Summary
Consultant Roger Mater told the council an interactive GroupSolver engagement collected over 1,000 responses and found affordable housing, youth and childcare, and education funding prominent among resident priorities; staff will distribute the dataset to departments to inform strategic planning.
Roger Mater, the mayor’s consultant on Vision 2050, presented an overview of the public engagement platform the city used to solicit ideas about Rochester’s long-term priorities. The consultant said the initiative received 1,004 respondents overall and that an interactive GroupSolver tool clustered open-ended responses into themes and produced top-20 recommendations for each category.
Mater described the methodology: respondents could reply via mobile chat-style prompts, QR codes, paper submissions that were ported into the system, or phone responses. The system groups similar language to surface themes; Mater showed an interactive wheel that highlighted youth and childcare as a leading concern, with affordable housing and education funding also rising to the top in subsequent ratings.
Council members asked about sample size and bias. Council member Palmer said the results felt unrepresentative and possibly biased; Mater and Mayor Norton replied that the project captured more than 1,000 responses (and an estimated 650+ completed entries for ranking), that the consultant had ported paper responses into the digital tool and that the team believes the sample provides useful direction with standard error estimates explained to the council. Mater encouraged council members to explore the full interactive dataset once staff publishes the link and said steering-committee recommendations will be shared with department heads and boards to inform strategic planning.
The presentation flagged a set of areas the steering committee prioritized for actioning the public input—housing, education, economic diversification, health access, culture and natural resources—and proposed that city departments and external organizations identified by the steering committee take leadership roles on respective items. Mater said the steering committee met the same day and will recommend how to route the findings to existing leaders and boards for follow-up.
Next steps: staff will publish the presentation and the underlying spreadsheet of ideas, route the findings to relevant departments and boards, and use the data to inform the council’s strategic planning process.
