Steamboat Springs — The City of Steamboat Springs has plans to seek public input on a broad variety of topics, including quality of life and growth, through a survey it will pay a consulting firm to conduct.

Today is the deadline for consulting companies to bid on conducting the survey, which will take several months to prepare before it is given to the public, Deputy City Manager Wendy DuBord said.

“The city has done several surveys in the past,” she said. “It’s quite common for cities to survey their citizens to find out what they are thinking.”

City officials really want to pick locals brains on subjects covered in a 1999 survey it conducted, in which 1,548 locals participated. The result of that was released in May of 2000.

DuBord said a couple of issues that concerned city officials included quality of life and growth. Half of the participants said they have become less satisfied living in Steamboat Springs since they first moved here and the majority expressed a concern with growth.

Since then, the Regional Affordable Living Foundation was formed, the city implemented impact fees on new construction and about 250 acres of land around Steamboat Springs has been preserved, DuBord said.

The new survey will ask questions on what citizens think about services the city provides from bus service to water taps.

“We’ll expand it a little bit,” DuBord said of the survey. “The whole idea is to find out from the citizens what is important.”

From contacting cities such as Vail and Boulder that recently did similar surveys, DuBord said the cost of hiring a consulting company to do the survey could be between $10,000 and $25,000.

The ’99 survey was done by city employees and interns.

This year, there aren’t any interns to do the work, so an outside company is being hired, DuBord said.

The whole process is expected to be completed by April 2002.