The City of Windsor is looking for the public's input on the state of the local environment.
Officials are asking residents to take part in a survey, which will run until the end of June, that will help contribute to the latest Report on the State of our Environment (ROSE).
This is the fourth ROSE since 2008, and is identified in Windsor's Environmental Master Plan as a way to monitor the plan's implementation and progress.
It allows the City to track specific environmental indicators over time, and the hope is that the indicators will improve as a result of changes to corporate policy and operations, as well as community action.
This report on the environment will reflect the realignment of goals set out in the 2017 master plan, including the separation of air and water quality into two separate goals to allow a specific focus on each element.
Karina Richters, Supervisor of Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change, says the report provides trends in data collected since 2007 and continues to be updated every four or five years.
"Really trying to hone in on what citizens feel like we're doing well, or where there might be concerns. Previously, back in 2005 and 2009, air quality was the number one concern for Windsor residents. Every four years we try to get a look at what are people's concerns now, and are they changing," she said.
As part of the reporting process, officials are asking residents to take part in the Environmental Attitudes Survey which will provide those insights for staff.
Richters says the results will help the City in prioritizing actions and making decisions that affect the community and impact the local environment.
She says the updated feedback will then be presented to council after it's collected.
"And in there we actually provide council with the metrics, which include the public consultation part, on what they want to see," she continued. "The results will actually be shown in the report on the state of the environment for council.
Richters says they will take the results of the survey and that will help staff inform the priorities for the next several years.
She says the Report on the State of our Environment was included in the first ever master plan, with the idea of continuously updating it periodically as the environment changes along with people's priorities.
"People can re-visit what their concerns on, and obviously there are emerging concerns that we might be dealing with now that we didn't think about in 2006 when the Environmental Master Plan was undertaken. So we want to make sure that we are continuously looking at the concerns of the residents and how do we move forward on improvements."
The survey can be found here.