Regarding Annex: What Enfield residents say they want

 

Five years before the Annex's future became a live debate, residents were already telling the town what they wanted it to be. The 2020–21 community survey never asked about the Fermi building, but about 20 people raised it on their own (out of 512). Fermi might not have been top-of-mind -- but recreation clearly was.

This chart ranks the ten themes Enfield residents raised most often in the open-ended, write-in portions of the 2020–21 town community survey, which drew 512 respondents. Each bar shows how many comments mentioned that theme; the colors flag whether it read mainly as a frustration (red), a wish (green), or an answer to the survey's redevelopment questions (navy). Many residents raised several issues at once: One person might have asked for both more recreation and lower taxes.

Source. Town of Enfield community survey, conducted December 4, 2020 through March 11, 2021, with 512 participants.

Method. Comments were grouped into themes by Claude Opus 4.8, an Anthropic AI model, through keyword analysis and a review of individual responses, with grouping reviewed by the author. Counts are directional rather than exact.

If you look at the source material, links below, it might seem a little confusing. The numbers (13, 24, 42, 44, 48) are the question numbers from the full town survey, which was mostly multiple-choice; these five were its open-ended, write-in questions, which is why they're scattered through the questionnaire rather than numbered 1 through 5.

Primary source for chart: https://www.enfield-ct.gov/DocumentCenter/View/18605

Town cloud analysis: https://www.enfield