Thornton survey: 821 residents surveyed show high satisfaction, traffic and streets top priorities

A community satisfaction survey commissioned by the City of Thornton and conducted by ETC Institute found broadly positive perceptions in 2025 but identified several priorities for city investment.

ETC Institute reported 821 completed surveys across Thorntons four wards, with a reported margin of error of about 3.4% at the 95% confidence level. "For a community your size, 821 completed surveys are very accurate," Ryan Murray of ETC said, describing the sample design: a mailed random sample stratified by ward and follow-up via text, phone and online outreach.

Key headline results: 75% of respondents rated Thornton as an "excellent or good" place to live (up about 7 percentage points since 2023) and 77% said the city is headed in the right direction (up roughly 5 points). Benchmarking against regional and national datasets showed Thornton above average on most comparable public-service items; the single below-benchmark item was traffic flow.

ETCs importance-satisfaction analysis identified five areas where dissatisfaction and importance overlap — and where the city stands to move perceptions most efficiently: traffic flow and congestion, condition of major city streets, condition of neighborhood streets, code compliance, and variety of stores/restaurants. "These items are among the top priorities for residents and among the lowest satisfied items," Murray said.

Council members asked for additional ward-level crosstabs, since smaller samples by ward increase margins of error; Murray and staff committed to providing ward breakouts and updated margins of error for those subgroup analyses. Staff also proposed using survey outcome measures as benchmarks in the citys strategic plan and to continue repeating the survey as a monitoring tool.

Whats next: Staff will present ward-level crosstabs and proposed ways to fold key outcome measures into the strategic-plan performance measures; council signaled interest in using the findings to guide capital and communications priorities related to streets and traffic.