Simsbury Residents Clearly Want to Maintain Our Small Town Look and Feel

I don’t think my fellow Simsbury residents expect our town to be like “Walton Mountain” or “Petticoat Junction”.

But our desire to live where there is a small-town feel with rural character and beauty, safety, quiet, plenty of open space, and a well managed and regulated development process are all priorities that came through loud and clear in the “Town of Simsbury Survey 2008”.  This report was sponsored by the Town of Simsbury and conducted by Pulsar Research & Consulting and should serve as important and timely input into much of how our Town land use boards and commissions evaluate potential projects for Town expansion.

I have attached a copy of the public record survey document to this blog posting which you can download and view, and I will summarize some of the key findings here.  As you peruse the document and these statistics, recognize that the management of land use in our town involves a complex intertwining of issues.  Residents overwhelmingly stated that they want excellent schools - this inherently costs a lot of money to achieve.  Residents want to preserve the bucolic character of the town – this requires tradeoffs for maintaining open space versus utilizing available land for development.  And residents want to relieve the tax burden pressure within limits – this requires careful budget juggling between current expenditures and revenue generation and the tug of war for controlled land development and economic expansion.  It also must include careful analysis of the “Net Economic Benefit” of land use and development which will be a topic for a future posting to this blog.  Interestingly, the researchers also asked questions attempting to elicit residents’ value for maintaining certain features of the town (e.g. open space, Route 10 as two lanes) and residents, in a somewhat subjective manner, approximated monetary value to these town features.

Take a few minutes to read through the attached document called “Simsbury Survey Report_10-23-08.pdf”.  In it you will see how the 404 residents surveyed felt about a variety of important topics.

To review some of the survey findings

Simsbury residents are extremely satisfied with their overall quality of life, more so than the views of residents in many other towns in the state.  A majority of 59% rate the overall quality of life as “excellent” and nearly all residents (95%) rate their quality of life as “good” or “excellent”.

The Top 10 Best Things About Simsbury (#1 Factor for Simsbury Quality of Life)

Residents ranked certain efforts undertaken by Simsbury Town government as being particularly important to them.  Residents emphasized the value of rural character and the high degree of open space even above a clear desire to have economic development.  This conclusion is consistent with other feedback in the Town Survey where respondents placed monetary value on certain Town Character features.

With regards to issues for improvement in Simsbury, the survey respondents stated a clear conundrum – how to maintain the attractive, desirable lifestyle of the town and reduce the tax burden at the same time.  Clearly tax burden is an issue that extends well beyond our town to the state, regional and federal levels.  The survey concluded that challenging factors in tough economic times tend to more often be factors like taxes and budgets while issues like school excellence and controlled building and development are hot topics when economic times are good.  It seems that the balance between the priorities of the extremes of the economic cycle (good times versus bad times) are essential for Simsbury to maintain the quality of life residents enjoy.

The Top 10 BIGGEST Problems Facing Simsbury

As previously discussed, maintaining the bucolic character of Simsbury is hugely important to residents.  The survey showed a prioritized list of potential economic development projects which residents ranked in terms of their support for the concepts.  The general conclusion from this list is consistent with the desire for tax relief with maintenance of the small town look and feel.

As mentioned earlier, a very interesting section of the survey evaluated residents’ willingness to pay varying amounts of money (presumably in the form of taxes) to maintain certain aspects of the Town’s character.  While this was by no means a complex or scientific conjoint study, residents placed value on maintaining the quality of the already excellent school system, preserving open space and maintaining high quality Town government services.

I think it’s important for every elected and appointed Simsbury land use or economic development commissioner or board member to read, re-read and then read this survey again to be sure that the tone and content are clear in their minds.  As our representatives they have taken an oath to listen and act based on the general consensus and desires of the people they represent – people like you and me.

To conclude for now, I have attempted to capture some of the essential nuggets from the Town Survey.  But if you want to dive deeper into the details and see the actual statistical results and response tables, feel free to read or download the attached survey document.  I think it’s important for us all to see how our personal beliefs and values comport with those in the survey results.  From my perspective, the survey closely matched my own personal views.  How does the survey match your thinking?  Please add a comment to this posting to let us know.