Northfield wants to know how you feel. But not about everything.
A walkthrough of the City of Northfield's first city services survey: what it measures, what it skips, and how to make your answers count
I’m among those who won the lottery to participate in the City of Northfield’s first-ever city services survey. Two weeks ago, this showed up in my mailbox, one of about 3,000 households selected at random:
It’s a serious step. The city hired ETC Institute, a national firm that has conducted these surveys for hundreds of cities, and plans to repeat it every two years to track how residents feel about city services over time. The first round is a baseline. Its real value depends on what comes next. The City’s Feb. 9 online news post, Community input drives city services has more details.
Since most Northfield residents won’t see the survey itself, I’ve posted a PDF of the full list of questions in Footnote #1 (not a fillable form, just the questions).
Below, I’ll walk through what the survey measures, a few design choices worth noticing, and what it doesn’t ask about. What a city chooses to measure tells you something about what it considers actionable. This is a satisfaction survey, not a policy survey. It asks 'how are we doing?' more than 'what should we do?' But the format also makes choices that shape what the data can and can't tell you.
One thing worth knowing if you were selected
The survey is confidential but not anonymous. The printed version includes your street address and extended zip code; the online version asks you to enter your street address on the final page. ETC uses this to map responses by neighborhood and ensure geographic representativeness, which is standard practice for surveys like this. But it means someone at ETC can connect your answers to your address. The city says your individual responses won't be shared, and ETC's privacy policy states that it doesn’t sell your information. Still, if you're the kind of person who would answer differently knowing your address is attached, that's worth being aware of before you start.
What this survey is good at
The survey uses a format called DirectionFinder, which ETC Institute has deployed in hundreds of cities. The structure is straightforward: for each topic area (police services, parks, streets, code enforcement, etc.), you rate your satisfaction on a five-point scale, then pick the one or two items you think should receive the most emphasis over the next two years.
That pairing is the instrument’s real strength. Satisfaction ratings alone tell you how people feel; the forced-choice emphasis questions tell you what people would prioritize if they can’t say “everything.” When ETC combines the two, it produces an Importance-Satisfaction analysis. Essentially, it’s a map of where the biggest gaps are between what residents care about most and where satisfaction is lowest. That’s more useful than a simple ranking.
The other thing this format does well is set a baseline for comparison. The first survey by itself is a snapshot. But if the city follows through on repeating it every two years, the second round becomes much more valuable. It allows you to see whether satisfaction with specific services moved after specific investments or policy changes. That’s the real payoff, and it only works if the questions stay consistent and the council treats results as more than a press release.
ETC’s national database also allows the city to compare Northfield’s scores with those of similar-sized cities. That’s less exciting than it sounds. Nobody’s going to change policy because a city in Nebraska rated its snowplowing differently. But it does one practical thing: it tells you whether a low score reflects a local problem or a nationwide pattern. If Northfield residents are unhappy with the availability of affordable housing, it matters whether comparable cities score the same or significantly better.
Three design choices worth noticing
No survey can ask everything, and a 15-minute instrument has to make choices. Three of those choices stood out to me.
The survey ranks priorities but doesn’t test tradeoffs.
The “pick your top two for emphasis” questions are genuinely useful. They force you to choose instead of rating everything as important. But they don’t ask what you’d give up to get your priority. Would you accept slower snowplowing to fund better park maintenance? Would you pay higher fees for improved stormwater management? The survey will tell the council what residents want emphasized, but not what they’re willing to trade away or pay for. Only one of the six comparable ETC surveys I reviewed (Creve Coeur, Missouri) included questions with actual dollar figures attached. The rest, like Northfield’s, stay in the realm of preferences without costs.
The transportation section measures values, not policy choices.
Q19 asks you to agree or disagree with six statements, all oriented toward safer and more comfortable walking and biking. Photo from the print survey:
Most people will agree with most of them. Who’s going to disagree with “I want children to safely walk from homes to schools and parks”? But the section doesn’t address competing priorities such as downtown parking or the cost of infrastructure changes. Agreement statements that point in one direction tend to produce high consensus without revealing where the real tensions are. Given that bike infrastructure is a contentious issue here in Northfield, the absence of any counterbalancing question is a design choice worth noticing.
The customer service section is actionable.
Q16 is the quiet standout. If you’ve contacted the city in the past year, it asks which department you reached, how easy it was to make contact, and then rates four specific employee behaviors: Were they courteous? Did they give accurate answers? Did they follow through on what they said they’d do? Did they resolve your issue? That’s closer to a performance rubric than a vibe check. It produces data that City Administrator Ben Martig and the Council can actually act on, by department, with specific behavioral metrics. If there’s a section of this survey designed to improve something concrete, this is it.
Three omissions that matter
A standardized instrument has real advantages: you can't benchmark what every city asks differently. So the useful question isn't "why didn't they include my issue?" but "what kinds of questions did they choose to measure with numbers, and what did they leave for the open comment box?" Three omissions stood out because they involve topics Northfield residents regularly discuss.
The city owns significant enterprises that aren’t mentioned.
Northfield operates a municipal liquor store, a municipal swimming pool, and the Northfield Community Resource Center, which houses the FiftyNorth Senior Center, the Community Action Center, and the Library Oasis, among other tenants. These are assets that generate revenue, require investment, and directly affect residents. The survey asks about parks, streets, sewers, stormwater, and code enforcement, all standard municipal services, but nothing about the enterprises the city runs as a business. Whether residents feel well-served by them, whether they see them as good uses of public resources: none of that is captured. This is probably the clearest sign that Northfield is running close to ETC’s standard template, since most cities don’t operate a municipal liquor store. (The city also owns the Northfield Hospital, but it’s governed by an independent board, so I don’t include it here. And the new ice arena won’t open until later this year, so it couldn’t be evaluated now, but it should be a natural addition when the survey is repeated in 2028.)
Taxes are measured as a feeling, not a question.
Q3 asks about “overall value of services for taxes/fees paid,” which is a satisfaction rating. It tells you whether people feel they’re getting their money’s worth. But it doesn’t ask whether residents think taxes are too high, too low, or about right. It doesn’t ask what they’d be willing to pay more for or what they’d cut. In a city where tax levels have been a contentious topic, the difference matters. Feeling like you’re getting good value and feeling like you’re paying too much can both be true at the same time, and this survey can only detect the first one.
Downtown is invisible.
There’s nothing about downtown vitality: foot traffic, business mix, the experience of spending time there. There’s nothing about Bridge Square, whose future has been debated for over a decade. In the 2024 mayoral primary, concerns about tax levels and major spending proposals, including a Bridge Square redevelopment plan, helped unseat the two-term incumbent. There’s nothing about downtown parking, a longstanding concern that has figured into multiple commercial development proposals over the years, none of which have come to fruition. Q15 asks about the pace of various types of development, and Q3 asks about commercial property appearance, but neither captures what most residents mean when they talk about how downtown is doing. For a city whose identity is closely tied to its historic downtown and river corridor, that’s a notable gap.
In each case, residents who care about these topics have one option: Q25, the open-ended comment box at the end. It’s the survey’s escape valve for everything the structured questions don’t cover. If you got a survey and something matters to you that isn’t asked about directly, that’s where to put it. And be specific.
If you got a survey: how to answer so it’s useful
If you’re one of the 3,000 households that received a survey, please fill it out. The baseline only works if enough people respond, and the response rate will determine how seriously anyone should take the results.
A few suggestions for making your responses count:
Use the full range of the satisfaction scale. If everything is “satisfied,” you haven’t told the city much. If you genuinely don’t have an opinion or experience with a service, “Don’t Know” is more useful than a lukewarm “Neutral.”
Take the priority questions seriously. The “pick your top two for emphasis” questions are where the survey has real teeth. Satisfaction ratings tell the city how you feel; priority rankings tell them where to focus. Those are different things, and the priority questions are harder to ignore.
Give Q25 everything the survey didn’t ask about. The open-ended comment box is mandatory, and it’s the only place to raise topics the structured questions don’t cover. If you care about downtown parking, Bridge Square, the liquor store, tax levels, or anything else that didn’t get its own set of questions, this is where it goes. But be specific. “Downtown needs work” gives the city nothing to act on. “I stopped shopping downtown because I can never find parking on Division Street” does.
One more thing: the survey asks if you’d participate in future surveys (Q26). Say yes. If the city follows through on its plan to repeat this every two years, a larger pool of willing respondents makes the next round stronger.
What to watch for in May
The city says results will be presented to the council in May, with a report published online. Here’s what I’ll be looking at.
How seriously to take the numbers.
Three things will tell you how representative the results are: the overall response rate, whether ETC weighted the results to match Northfield’s actual demographics, and whether the city publishes enough detail for residents to see how different groups responded. A 30% response rate with demographic weighting is useful data. A 15% response rate with no weighting tells you what a small slice of engaged residents think, not what the community thinks.
Whether the city publishes the full report.
Every comparable ETC survey I reviewed resulted in a findings report of 80 to 150 pages, including charts, data tables, benchmarking comparisons, and a copy of the survey instrument in an appendix. Some cities also published the open-ended comments as a separate document and offered interactive dashboards. If Northfield releases only a council presentation or executive summary, that’s worth asking about.
What residents wrote in Q25.
The open-ended comments are where everything the structured questions didn’t ask about will surface: downtown, taxes, Bridge Square, city-owned enterprises, and whatever else is on people’s minds. Whether the city publishes those responses, and how fully, will say a lot about how transparent they’re willing to be with unstructured feedback.
Whether the council acts on the results or just receives them.
There’s a difference between “we heard you” and “here’s what we’re going to do about it.” The whole point of a benchmarking survey is to set targets and measure progress. If the May presentation ends with appreciation for the useful information and no specific commitments, the 2028 survey will just be measuring the same baseline again. What would “taking it seriously” look like? The council adopts a handful of measurable service goals tied to the findings. Staff publishes a simple accounting: here’s what you said, here’s what we did, and here’s what we couldn’t do and why. The 2028 survey then measures whether anything moved.
I’ll be covering the results when they’re released.
See the latest Northfield.org posts in the archive.
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Wish I’d read this before I filled mine out and sent it in.