Chico encourages business feedback for city operations with annual survey

The City of Chico is holding a business survey for the second year in a row looking to tighten communication between the city and its 4,000 businesses.

With only 5% of businesses taking part last year, this year, the city is hoping to get more involvement. The survey aims to find the key questions comments and concerns that local businesses have when it comes to operations in Chico, despite not having a ton of participation last year. The city was still able to get helpful feedback which resulted in a new community business training series called Business and Breakfast.

“Businesses were interested in assistance with marketing, they wanted to know more about financing their business, and they wanted to know about how to connect with student interns,” said Chico Deputy City Manager, Jennifer Macarthy. “So we took a lot of this information and had over 57 businesses that reached out and wanted individual information for their business.”

Team Chico is the economic development collaborative funded by the city that has been running this survey. A goal of theirs is to learn about what type of employees are most needed in the city. Mccarthy told KRCR that a large part of this survey is to find what has made businesses come to Chico and what makes them stay.

Macarthy said that as long as these surveys are helpful to the city they will continue to conduct them annually. Local businesses have until the end of July to participate in the survey.