Case Study: City of Laguna Beach establishes a performance baseline with Polco surveys

How Laguna Beach Established a Baseline for Local Government Performance

The City of Laguna Beach partnered with Polco to better understand how residents, business owners, and employees felt about the city and its services. Facing questions about employee satisfaction, police recruitment and retention, and community and business needs, the city wanted a data-driven baseline to see where it stood and where it could improve, using Polco’s National Employee Survey, National Employee Survey for Law Enforcement, National Business Survey, and National Community Survey.

Polco helped Laguna Beach run four scientific surveys across different audiences and benchmark the results against other communities and the city’s own past data. The findings showed very high resident quality of life and strong ratings in areas like public safety, while also identifying opportunities around mobility, affordable housing, parking, childcare, business retention, and traffic flow. The city posted the results publicly and plans to use the baseline to guide future community, business, and organizational improvements and measure progress over time.

City of Laguna Beach

Jeremy Frimond

Senior Management Analyst