Memorandum

City of Lawrence

Parks and Recreation Department

TO:	David L. Corliss, City Manager
FROM:	Ernie Shaw, Interim Director
CC:
Date:	Tuesday, December 8, 2009
RE:	Public Forum Follow-Up

I wanted to provide an update from the conversation we had with the City Commission Oct. 6, 2009, regarding the public discussion to identify and prioritize future Parks and Recreation needs in the community.

We began the dialogue through three public forums held Oct. 26, Nov.5 and Nov. 10. During the forum, we held the presentation that you saw on Oct. 6, after which we had participants fill out a survey to rank the top three items from a list in four different categories (indoor recreation facility needs; outdoor recreation facility needs; park development needs and trail development needs).  We also conducted some additional outreach opportunities with other community groups to provide additional feedback from a cross-section of the community.  After conducting all the public forums, we then made the survey, as well as the presentation available on the city Web site. We had more than 150 people participate in our public forums and more than 575 people complete the survey online.

We’ve provided a copy of the survey used to gather input, as well as the survey results.

The survey results spreadsheet shows each of the four categories with the list of items that were provided to participants and the number of selections each received for being first, second and third choices. The column “Combined/Weighted” combines the rankings from both the public forums and the online survey.  We’ve also weighted the results to account for the emphasis placed on selecting an item first, second and/or third, providing validity for items and how they were selected.

Those items selected first and second were given multipliers (5-times and 3-times respectively) while those selected third were not weighted additionally above the number of choices each received.

For instance, under the Indoor Recreation Facilities Need “Recreation Center” was selected first 248 times by participants when combining the data from both the public forum and online surveys.  We’ve then taken the 248 first-choice rankings and multiplied by five to get the 1240. The combined numbers from both surveys were then calculated for those selected second (199) and then multiplied by three (597). The total number of those selected third (87) were then added to the multiplied numbers to get the total number listed in the second to the last column on the right (1924). After all items in a category were calculated, we then added them together and found the percentage for each item as it related to the overall total.

We’ve also provided a combined, composite list of items participants selected as “Other” for each of the categories, along with the number of participants who ranked their items first, second or third.

The department also received several comments via e-mail regarding the public forum and parks and recreation needs within the community.

We wanted to get this information to you for review and would like to request adding a discussion to a future City Commission meeting after the first of the year. We will continue to work on developing our priority list, as well as explore alternate funding sources, i.e. public/private partnerships.

If you have questions prior to that please don’t hesitate to contact me.