Townsend residents love their city for its small, peaceful and quiet nature, according to preliminary results of a survey being conducted by the SE Group. The organization is surveying residents and lovers of the Peaceful Side of the Smokies as part of a contract with the city’s Community Plan Advisory Committee, and committee members got a sneak peek at the results last week during their meeting Aug. 20.
Townsend has been working toward a new community plan for months, with the CPAC finally contracting with SE Group and the East Tennessee Development District to aid in the process earlier this year. City officials have often pointed to the future document as an important part of the region’s growth.
CPAC members have long emphasized the need for community input in the process.
“I like the fact that it’s coming from the source — from the people that really collect and identify with Townsend,” CPAC chair David Hoque said during the meeting last week. “Townsend wants to be unique. It wants to have its own way about it, and this is the best way to do that.”
Results
SE Group’s Ida Williams gave an overview of preliminary results during last week’s meeting. The survey has just under four hundred responses, she said, and the completion rate is over 90% — an impressive achievement for any survey. A key element for visualizing what the citizens want, she said, is word clouds: graphics that take keywords from responses and scale their size based on how commonly they appear.
Those keywords will tell the committee what citizens think of their hometown.
“Peaceful Side of the Smokies continues to define it greatly,” Williams said at the meeting, appearing through a video call. “Preservation, small-town character, community space and natural resources are important to be preserved and protected.”
Other important elements include community, growth and the local economy, she said.
When asked what they would change about Townsend, respondents frequently said “nothing.” Responses also featured the words “less” and “change,” which Williamson pointed out as a limitation of the word clouds. Those words frequently feature in phrases asking officials to change how the Little River is treated and asking for “less tourism.”
“The word ‘Jeeps’ comes up a lot in this area,” she said, pointing out its presence on the chart.
Future
Vocal Townsend residents have long complained of congestion and inconvenience around festivals and special events, such as Jeeps Takeover Townsend and the Great Smoky Mountains Hot Air Balloon Festival. Special events bring in thousands of outside visitors, powering the local economy and fueling the city budget, but residents say an emphasis on tourist dollars and development is ruining the small-town, peaceful feel they love.
According to the preliminary survey results, visitors also value that small-town feel. SE Group’s survey filters respondents by factors like place of residence and relationship to Townsend. At last week’s meeting, Williams said the largest category of respondents was full-time Townsend residents. Frequent visitors narrowly followed, although some CPAC members debated the need to include external opinions.
“The thing is, it can’t all just be people that own land here,” vice-chair Houston Oldham said. “You’ve got people with leases and businesses with an interest here and people who live here part-time. We’ve got to be a little lenient there, but we also have to be able to mark that data if we can.”
Williams told the committee that she had checked to make sure people from the same IP address had not filled out multiple copies of the form. The survey is available at cityoftownsend.com/wp/townsend-community-plan-update.
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