The individual survey collected about 600 responses from around the state. Here is a sneak peek at what we’ve heard and seen from this information. There’s more to come, but some snippets of information to get you started:
Who we heard from: Overall, the responses are consistent with the population disbursement of the state, with a majority of responses coming from the south central region, followed by other population centers, with the more rural areas having the fewest respondents.
Responses by region:
What we’ve heard: To keep the information as free flowing as possible, the survey was mostly open ended questions, so the team looked carefully at grouping the responses as closely as possible to most accurately reflect what we were hearing from our responses:
Top reason for living in Alaska:
What are Alaska’s biggest opportunities:
These results closely mirror what our top industries are – the visitor industry ranked high, likely because of that industry’s success in recent years, along with a positive outlook for the coming years. Resource development, mining, oil and gas, and natural gas could be arguably combined, which would put those categories at the top, followed by fisheries as our top categories.
Alaska’s greatest opportunities:
What would make Alaska a better place to live?
The overwhelming number one category here, was economic development. Keeping in mind that this was an open ended question, when categorizing the data, we took the liberty to classify responses like “economic diversification”, “business development”, “diversified economy”, and the like under this category.
What would make Alaska a better place to live?
