Illumifest This Saturday

The main entrance to City Hall has taken on a new look in the last couple of weeks—anyone who works here or has stopped by in that time period has doubtless seen the unique and attractive lantern feature in the lobby. This display is part of a unique new community festival devised by the City's Parks and Recreation department called Illumifest. Residents are encouraged to gather on the City/School Campus this Saturday, September 27, to create paper lanterns and then be part of a special lighting ceremony near the pond. The City hopes to have over 500 lanterns made and used at the event.

The lanterns in the City Hall lobby were made exclusively for Illumifest by Iowa artists participating in an art contest, and will be part of an auction to help raise money for next year’s art contest.

In addition to lantern making, Illumifest will have numerous events for adults and kids from 6-10 pm including free carnival rides, inflatables, displays by the Chinese Association of Iowa, live music, a beverage garden, food vendors, and fireworks. Our Parks and Recreation department has worked to obtain several sponsors for the event, which should make it a very exciting night.

Please stop by and support this unique new event for West Des Moines!

Citizen Survey 2008 - Take the call!

The City's biannual citizen survey will be conducted again this month. The ETC Institute, an objective third party the City contracts to perform the survey, will begin calling households at the end of this week! If you are one of 400 random households that receives a call, I sincerely hope you consider taking the survey. It covers a variety of topics including city maintenance, city communications, code enforcement, public safety, library and parks services, and a couple of questions at the end of the survey aim to capture your vision for the future of our community. City departments and elected officials use questions from all parts of the survey to set benchmarks as part of our Balanced Scorecard system (see prior post on the BSC here -- scroll down to the May 19 entry) and to prioritize services based on what is important to residents. These results are then compared to the surveys conducted in 2002, 2004, and 2006, as well as to surveys conducted in cities of comparable size and status across the nation.

This is a tremendous opportunity to provide detailed feedback to your elected officials and city staff on many issues. If you want to see some summary data from the 2006 survey, click here.