By GRAHAM BROOKS / Staff Writer

HELENA–In order to gather more specific information on what improvements need to be made to ensure that Helena continues to be a top place to live for residents, an online survey was conducted to gather feedback from the public.

City leaders are looking to update the city’s long-range comprehensive plan and have been gathering data from a 10 question survey to help evaluate where the city of Helena thrives and where the city might need to make improvements.

A public input session was held on Thursday, Dec. 3 to analyze some of the results of the survey.

Katherine Ennis, who helped collect answers and responses to the survey, presented the results at the public input session to city leaders.

“We’ve had an outstanding response,” said Ennis. “We have had somewhere in the range of 210 responses to the survey so far. I’ve been going through these questions one-by-one and sorting through them to determine how many times somebody answers questions a certain way.”

A few questions from the survey included asking residents what they think are Helena’s biggest assets and weaknesses, what are the biggest challenges for the future, and what would you like to see happen in Helena during the next 10 years, among others.

Of the 210 responses, the majority of residents believed that Helena’s biggest assets were schools and teachers, the small town atmosphere, safety and parks and trails.

As for the weaknesses, residents responded overwhelmingly that traffic has become one of Helena’s biggest weaknesses as well as trains and crossings and the variety of restaurants offered.

Ennis noted that a city’s long-range comprehensive plan should be updated every five years and once the survey concludes on Dec. 11, she will be working with city leaders to complete the final plan sometime in February 2016.

As far as some of the challenges in the city, residents would like to see traffic improvements, keeping the small town atmosphere while maintaining quality of life and property values, recruit new businesses and continue to keep crime down.

Those wishing to participate in the online survey can do so by visiting Surveymonkey.com/r/Helena2015. The survey will be taking responses until Dec. 11.