BrentI applaud council’s Jan 2022 launch of a strategic planning process. It will be refreshing for the city and community. I cannot over emphasize the value of planning. Indeed, a S.W.O.T. (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) is an important part of the process and deserves focus.
I respectfully ask council to keep some basics in mind:
- The operative word is “process”. Strategies take shape over time, carefully plotted out on a steady course.
- Strategic planning has a hierarchy of focus to follow.
- Vision. What do we want to achieve as a city? (The big picture)
- Mission. How do we want to achieve the vision? (The roadmap)
- Values. How do we want to behave during the journey?
- Strategies. What tools, talents, and methods can we use, and what barriers might we face along the way? (S.W.O.T. plays a role here along with other assessment techniques)
- Goals. What must be done to put the strategy in motion?
- Objectives. Reasonable, achievable, measurable, and accountable milestones and timetables needed to accomplish the goals.
- Action Plans. Detailed and specific steps and tasks needed to take complete the objectives.
Strategic planning is a step-by-step, dynamic process involving much time.
While looking for city history on all or any part of the process, I (admittedly) stumbled on a document that was hiding in plain site on the city website. It seems we have a city 2016 Master Plan, parts 1 & 2. The first one was in 2010 and the current one in 2016. City council, the planning commission, city staff, and an impressive number of dedicated, skillful, and industrious residents endeavored to craft these comprehensive master plans for the city. It looks to be a herculean effort. I’m not sure what prompted the 2016 edition, or if was merely an update of the 2010 edition. I didn’t discover any further updates or reviews since 2016, now over five years. The master plan itself stresses the need to maintain it. I would be curious whether that has been done. I could not find evidence. So the 2016 Master Plan might be dated.
While the 2016 Master Plan is not, per se, a clear statement of our city’s vision and mission, it alludes to both, and with some distilling a vision and mission can be discovered in the document. Also, while the 2016 Master Plan is now over five years old, and perhaps not maintained, it nonetheless is a treasure trove of facts, thoughts, hopes, and dreams provided by a very dedicated mass of people in the community and local government.
As a very beginning part of any strategic planning process, the first building blocks must be a vision and a mission for the city. If we indeed have it, I’m not sure I’ve seen or been able to find it, short of what I sifted through in the 2016 Master Plan. So, I encourage council to please consider this question as we embark on our strategic planning journey:
Does the city 2016 Master Plan provide any kind of “baseline” (be it outdated or updated) from which our strategic planning process can launch or linchpin from, especially given the need for a vision and mission on which our strategies are built?
I really don’t know if it does or not just looking at the document briefly if it does or it doesn’t. There may not even be a right or wrong answer. But it seems a lot of time and talent and thought and commitment went into creating our 2016 Master Plan. Regardless of its relative value to our current strategic planning effort, the 2016 document does exist and giving it some type of preamble recognition to our current planning efforts could be a way to express recognition and thanks (if nothing else) to those who toiled on it. Council may already plan to tie or reconcile the 2016 Master Plan with the scheduled strategic planning process. If so, good. If not, please consider doing so as a gesture of goodwill to prior city leaders and staff, and the public who contributed to the 2016 Master Plan.
