The Wilmette Park District has extended the deadline for residents to complete a survey about potential upgrades to the district’s lakefront parks until Feb. 14.
More than 1,200 Wilmette households had completed the survey as of Jan. 28, a return rate of 12 percent from the district’s roughly 10,000 households, Executive Director Steve Wilson told the park board’s lakefront committee Feb. 1.
“I’m told that in these sorts of things, a three to five percent hit rate is typical, so we are well out-performing that level in the world of surveys,” he said.
The survey was scheduled to close by the end of January, but the district is holding it open to capture more responses, he said.
Park commissioners decided last year to use the survey, created by Evanston-based aQity Research, to gauge how residents want to use Gillson and Langdon parks and what type of physical upgrades they want there. The commission did so in the wake of the April, 2015 defeat at the polls of two bond referendums which, if approved, would have allowed the district to finance $14.5 million in lakefront repairs and upgrades.
In a 33 percent voter turnout, residents rejected the two referendums, one which would have allowed the district to issue $12.7 million in bonds for repairs and upgrades at Gillson Park and one that would have let the district issue $1.8 million in bonds for work at the much-smaller Langdon Park.
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Board members and district administrators, who said the district still needs to complete at least sewer and road repairs, as well as projects designed to make Lakeview Center in Gillson Park and some other lakefront areas Americans with Disabilities Act compliant, decided to test the waters again with the survey.
After hiring aQity last October, the district invited of pro- and anti-referendum community groups that had operated during the referendum campaign to sit down with aQity president Jeff Andreasen and give him input on what questions he should put into the survey. The representatives met with the researcher in late October and the survey went out last month.
As of last week, 850 respondents had completed the survey online, another 360 households mailed hard copies of the survey back in, and 11 household representatives took the survey over the phone, he said. The results will be available next month.
The park district mandated a minimum response of 500 households; Andreasen said he hoped to get between 1,000 and 2,000 survey returns, which would represent between 10 and 20 percent of the district’s households.
Wilson said this week that the company has reported getting responses fairly evenly across Wilmette. A geographically-even response to questions about the lakefront was something park board commissioners wanted from survey results.
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy