Strategic Decision-Making Capacity:
Capacity to Solve Regional Problems
For metropolitan areas to address their most significant issues, residents must come together around a common agenda.
Most Important Metropolitan Issues
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After asking respondents to rate both their community and their metro on a wide variety of issues (Survey Question 6), we asked them to identify the top three issues they would like local leaders to address in their metropolitan area over the next five years.
The issue most chosen by residents of the Kansas City area was crime — selected by 47 as one of the top three metro issues. This is followed by public schools and job growth, respectively. Public schools, the number two choice, was selected only about half as often as crime, however. This shows us that beyond concerns about crime, there is little broad agreement on a regional policy agenda.
While crime is also the top issue in Minneapolis and St. Louis, there is substantially higher agreement among residents on the need to address public schools and other issues than in Kansas City. In Denver, in fact, public schools rates higher than crime, paving the way for progress on an issue that may have greater impact on economic competitiveness.
Willingness to Work Together
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Having identified their top three metropolitan issues, respondents were next asked to think about their top priority and asked how willing they would be for local governments to address it by 1) working together 2) pooling resources or 3) raising taxes (such as a sales tax).
The Kansas City region showed the most support for all three questions. Denver closely followed with respect to working together and pooling resources. However, 61 percent of Kansas City respondents said they would supported raising taxes to address their number one priority. No more than 50 percent of residents in the other peer metros indicated they would support raising taxes.
While what people say in a survey and how they actually vote are not always the same, the relative magnitude suggests significantly greater willingness to support regional cooperation here than in the other areas.
Level of Civic Engagement
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Increasingly, an engaged citizenry is seen as an essential asset to overcome institutional inertia and make progressive, strategic regional decisions. To measure levels of civic engagement, the Metro Outlook Survey asked questions derived from the social capital work of Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and co-author (with Lewis Feldstein) of Better Together. The level of social capital in a region helps determine how well we work together to solve common problems, and one measure of it is how connected we are to our communities.
Kansas City area residents are at least as engaged and connected to their communities as those in other peer metros. The relatively small differences between the metros may indicate the level of engagement is related to values that are shared across the nation’s heartland.
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