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6—6 Orange County Comprehensive Parks and Recreation Master Plan CHAPTER 6 - Community Needs Assessment and Public Input 6 A strong majority of the cumulative respondents like the quality of existing facilities, agree that more active and low-impact facilities are needed, and believe in an expanded trail system linking various areas of the county. Support for indoor facilities for arts and leisure and athletics is not as strong, but still a majority. Respondents gave very high marks for safety, maintenance, access and friendliness of staff (94% Agree/Strongly Agree). The vast majority of all respondents believe that parks and recreation programs enhance the economic health of the county, enhance physical and mental well-being and (to slightly lesser degree) reduce crime. 3. Recreation Activity Participation In this case, over half (58%) of respondents identified athletic leagues or programs they had participated in during the previous year. Most of these were respondents to the online survey. Considerably fewer persons in the SRS survey had experience participating in a County recreation program in the past year. The most popular pro- grams by participation in the past 12 months were: 1. Youth Soccer (35%) 2. Youth Basketball (30%) 3. Open Gym (9%) 4. Little River Trail Run (6%) 5. Volleyball (5%) Most popular instructional programs in the online survey were Start Smart Soccer, Zumba, Tennis (both adult and youth), Golf (youth and adult) and Creative Arts. The full list and breakdown of participants may be found in Appendix 6-6. The most popular environmental programs were the County’s Earth Day event (34%), followed by Under the Stars (17%) and Tiny Trekkers (17%) programs at Little River Regional Park and Natural Area. The Little River Park Bird Counts also received 11% of the votes. In response to the question “How often do you or members of your household travel outside of Orange County to participate in recreation pro- grams,” 471 respondents (62.4%) indicated they never traveled outside of the county for programs. In looking at the sum total of all surveys received in Table 1, one of the most striking things about the responses is that the respondents in the SRS , online and targeted surveys are all fairly similar in their view of County facilities, programs and value. This is particularly noteworthy as the online survey is a younger, more Hillsborough and rural Orange County located cohort., whereas the SRS survey has a high response from urban southern Orange County, and is older in general. The SRS survey answers to each question range around 5-7 percentage points higher in the agree/strongly agree category than the online survey. (Please see Appendix 6-3 and 6-4 to compare the two survey results). The number of “Don’t Know” responses is listed in the final column, and in parentheses the number of those that came from the SRS survey is shown. As can be seen, in many cases the vast ma- jority of persons answering “Don’t Know” were in the SRS survey, which further validates the previous note about respondents in these areas being less familiar with County facilities and programs since they include a majority of respondents from the towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. In summary, the combined survey results shown here track with most of the “Agree/Disagree” aggregate response rates from the other individual surveys. Online survey participants were somewhat more interested in expanding active outdoor recreation opportunities and were also slightly less certain about a trail system linking various areas of the county. However, the rate of “Agree” responses stayed fairly consistent between the surveys. 70