With a new city commissioner seated and a city manager soon to be selected, the city is trying to make known the results of a seven-page citizen survey — an instrument city leaders will use to create long-range plans.

“We’ll use it once we have our new city manager on board,” said assistant city manager Casey Toomay. “Data like this is useful when talking about the city plan. This helps us know what the priorities are.”

The city has been releasing statistics from the survey to residents since early November. Results were first made known in July, when they were presented to the City Commission by Olathe-based consulting firm ETC Institute, which conducted the survey of 1,330 households.

The top three priorities residents listed as needing improvement were street maintenance, traffic congestion, and police, fire and EMS.

Another priority listed was the quality of planning and code enforcement.

Street maintenance and traffic congestion were both listed as the top two priorities during the city’s most recent survey in 2011. Toomay said the inclusion of police, fire and EMS in the 2015 survey could be a result of recent discussions about the need for a new police facility.

Developing public safety facilities such as a new police headquarters was supported by 52 percent of those who responded.

“I think that’s been kind of interesting given our conversation about the police facility,” Toomay said. “I think it will be more useful as we move into the next cycle of having those priority conversations.”

Toomay said city department heads have been told to use the survey results as they bring issues to the attention of the City Commission “so the public knows that we’re listening and trying to respond.”

The departments will also use the results to develop their own long-range plans and goals, she said.

Areas that “exceeded expectations” were trash and yard waste services, parks and recreation, quality of water and wastewater services and customer service.

The survey showed residents are generally more satisfied overall with city services than they were in 2007, when the first survey of this kind was conducted in Lawrence. The Kansas City metropolitan area and the nation as a whole had downward trends in overall satisfaction, the survey states.

Kevyn Gero, a management assistant with the city, said this year’s survey had 42 data points that increased since the last survey in 2011.

In the survey, residents were asked to rate their level of satisfaction about approximately 100 items, from the overall quality of city departments to connectivity of sidewalks and walking paths and smell of the drinking water.

About 600 people responded to a section of the survey asking for comments. Gero said she was going through the answers to present findings to city leaders.

The city would like to do a citizen survey every four years to see trends over time, said Megan Gilliland, city spokesperson.

“This data is something that every single person in our community, whether they choose to pay attention to it or not, affects them in some way,” Gilliland said. “When you set your trash out, you drive on the roads, you turn on your faucet, you’re interacting with the city. Our hope is people will buzz through the data and understand what we’re seeing as trends and how we can use that to create a better city and better organization.”