Riverside County residents who participated in a survey to gauge what matters most to them rated “public works and community services” at the top, while public safety took second place — a switch from the previous fiscal year, according to results presented to the county Board of Supervisors Tuesday.
“The differences (from year-to-year) were subtle,” UC Riverside School of Public Policy Dean Mark Long told the board Tuesday. “Infrastructure was a little bit more emphasized this year than last. I didn’t come away with any surprise. These surveys are useful information, but I wouldn’t take them as purely what you should do as supervisors.”
Long, as well as two graduate students — Andres Gugig and Esther Mejia — were retained by the county Executive Office to conduct the 2026-27 Community Budget Priorities Survey over the winter. The online polls took place ahead of a series of community workshops held in each of the five supervisorial districts.
The surveys taken during the workshops provided only a very small sampling of opinion, while the online questionnaires received wide participation, with a total 26,543 respondents, according to documents posted to the board’s agenda Tuesday.
It was the second year the county commissioned a countywide survey. The previous one, completed in winter 2025, reflected that the highest level of interest was in public safety.
While the latter slipped into second place this year, it was a marginal difference from public works, which landed a 64% rating among all respondents, compared to 60% for public safety.
The other priorities were healthcare at 53%, human services at 49%, government finance at 23% and “internal services” — the public sector’s inter-agency operations — at 4%.
The survey team said “key words” were the determinants of how to classify respondents’ answers to the online questionnaires. For public works, terms such as “road maintenance” and “pothole repairs” were what amplified understanding of residents’ priorities, according to the team.
“People could write whatever they wanted,” Gugig told the board. “But I think if it was things that affect them on a daily basis, that’s what they wrote about.”
The team said poorly lit and damaged streets, or corridors where flooding is an issue, would push a higher number of responses into the public works category.
The Second District’s residents responded at the highest level, with just under 7,000 respondents to the survey. The district encompasses Canyon Lake, Corona, Eastvale, Jurupa Valley, Lake Elsinore, Temescal Valley and multiple other communities.
The lowest response rate was in the Fifth District, where there were 4,435 respondents. The district includes Banning, Beaumont, Calimesa, Hemet, Moreno Valley and San Jacinto. Most of the survey takers were English speakers, though 599 responses were exclusively in Spanish.
One Fifth District resident and a frequent commentator on county business, Roy Bleckert, told the board the survey results should speak less to what the supervisors should do and more of what they should refrain from doing.
“Practically everything that comes through here, as you grow the government monster bigger, makes the lives of everyone in Riverside County harder,” Bleckert said. “The more you spend, the worse everything becomes. When do you start to drop, like Sweden did, the influence of government and empower the people you serve?”
Another speaker, Veronica Langworthy of the Third District, touched on a similar topic, saying the results reflected how the board can make people’s lives better by reducing government red tape.
“If you can drop fees to adopt animals from county shelters, how about dropping fees for humans?” she said. “It’s impossible for people to house because of the fees from government on property.”
Supervisor Jose Medina said he found the results “helpful as we look at the budget decisions we make and the priorities we set.”
The entire survey can be found at rivco.gov/budget.
