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Staunton city council received its biannual report card this past week, giving council members every reason to feel downright chipper. But it’s not all wine and roses, and a couple of red flags popped up.
The report card was Staunton’s second National Community Survey (NCS), which every two years polls city residents on a wide range of topics about city services and quality of life. The survey also compares Staunton’s responses with those of more than 400 other cities that the NCS also surveys, as well as with a smaller subset of that group that more closely matches Staunton demographically. The good news? Staunton’s residents overwhelmingly feel good about their community, and in almost every instance give it higher marks than they did just two years ago. Moreover, Staunton residents rate their city as high or higher than their counterparts in the comparison groups, with only a couple of exceptions.
City residents should look at the survey results to draw their own conclusions, but there are a handful of findings I think are worth singling out. Most encouraging, perhaps, is the great increase in public confidence in city government after several new council members took office in 2024, ending a turbulent few years of contending factions on that governing body. As a result, more city residents think their government is honest, open and transparent, up 15%, and more of them believe their government is acting in their best interests and welcomes resident involvement, up 14%.
Although the great majority of responses were similar to those of two years ago—this year’s survey has a 95% level of confidence, but in its comparisons with 2024, the difference has to exceed 5.97% to be statistically significant—27 items had an upward trend and five ratings decreased. The drops, notably, included a 10% decline in ease of travel by public transportation and a 9% decrease in the overall quality of utility infrastructure. More about both those downturns in a moment.
In addition to overall trends, a key measure in the NCS survey is the gap between the quality of a service or resource and its importance to the respondent. In most cases the weights given to those measures are quite close to each other, but for the two most important categories, there’s a yawning chasm between importance and quality: the city’s economic health was rated at 94% for importance, but got only a 49% rating for quality—and that’s down from 53% two years ago. And the city’s utility infrastructure, rated at 92% for importance, was dinged at merely 57% for quality.
The economic health rating was consistent with the answers to other, similar questions. While Staunton got high marks for the quality of its business and service establishments and the vibrancy of its downtown, those rating its economic development as excellent or good declined to 47% from 51% in 2024—not statistically significant, but suggestive nonetheless. That response also dovetails with a remarkably low 15% replying positively to the question, “What impact, if any, do you think the economy will have on your family income in the next 6 months?” That’s down from 23% two years ago, and while it’s not a Staunton-specific question, it does attest to a broader anxiety that colors local perceptions.
Meanwhile, the gap between the importance of the city’s utility infrastructure and its quality points to two problems with this kind of survey. One is the lack of precision, leaving it up to the respondent to decide what “utility infrastructure” means: does that refer to city-owned and operated utilities, principally water and sewer? Or does it include utilities in the city that are non-municipal monopolies, such as gas and electric, over which the city has little control? The second problem is one of timing, which in this case might have influenced the answers of city residents who lost water shortly before the survey was conducted because of a massive main rupture—or who might have been disgruntled instead by a sudden spate of street closures due to work by Columbia Gas, which also occurred around the time of the survey.
In other words, are Staunton residents waking up to the long overdue need to upgrade a century-old water distribution system, or are they simply unhappy because of ill-timed work by a private utility?
Finally, no summary of high- or low-points would be complete without mention of two of its lowest-rated aspects: the availability of affordable quality housing, which came in at 23%, and the city’s care of its vulnerable residents, down from 44% last year to 38% now. No surprise there, albeit distressingly so. If there’s any silver lining, it’s that both those findings are similar to those of other cities—which only means that we’re no worse than anyplace else, although that’s hardly praiseworthy.
The bottom line, it’s fair to say, is that Staunton’s residents really, really like living here, they feel that the city government is working in everyone’s best interests, but they’re also economically anxious and unsure about the future. Sounds like a solid ‘A,’ but with room for improvement.
P.S. I said I’d get back to the decline in ease of travel by public transportation. That’s another of those questions that is clouded in ambiguity, but I’ll submit again the roundly ignored recommendation I’ve made before: after spending more than a million bucks on upgrading the BRITE Bus hub on Lewis Street, would it be a budget breaker to post maps and schedules on the bus shelters? “Ease of travel” begins with knowing where the buses go, and when.
Looking askance 