Living environment in the estimates of citizens

Within the meaning of the phenomenon of life quality it is important not only to determine its main features but also to pay attention to the possibilities of the regulation of its elements including prosperity of living environment. In this issue local authorities play an important role because their work influences people’s satisfaction with living environment. Public opinion surveys help to estimate the level of people’s satisfaction with living environment. They make it possible to reveal problems of urban living that create the biggest tension in social environment and hence demand special attention from local authorities. In the Vologda Oblast living conditions in the city of Vologda are being monitored for several years, but in Cherepovets - the second big city of the region - such survey was conducted in 2015 for the first time. This offers an opportunity to compare the estimations of living environment quality in both cities and the revealed problems, as well as to structure them. The survey revealed that in general people of both cities estimate the overall state of living environment and their living conditions in a positive light. At the same time the respondents do not find the work of local authorities efficient enough. The citizens think local government bodies have little effect on changes in process, and it affects their estimates of local authorities. Despite the fact that problems in the cities of the region are in many ways identical, the estimates of local authorities have major difference. The hypothesis of the research is that the difference in the estimates of local government bodies is coming from structural peculiarities of the revealed problems, and in future this will require various managerial decisions from city authorities. As a tool for the analysis the author used Pareto chart that allows to reveal the most important problems, separate them from the minor, and to determine the priority of managerial tasks. The obtained result of the study allowed first to see the difference in importance of urban problems for the citizens and to determine the most important ones; secondly, to see significant differences in the structure of problems depending on the territorial belonging; thirdly, to educe basic areas for taking managerial decisions by local government bodies that can ease the tension in urban community and influence political preference formation in the coming pre-election time. The most of urban problems are under the authority of local government.