“Cities set strategic plans as a way to set broad goals for the community, with public input, so that over a span of multiple years, the council, the staff and the community overall has a focus on the goals they want to accomplish.”
With those words, Community Development Director Michael Mays introduced Robyn Stiles, the consultant hired by the city to help guide them through the process of establishing a new five-year strategic plan.
Mays noted that typically, strategic plans have measurable, actionable goals attached to them and said that the goals in the last plan, which covered through fiscal year 2024, have been accomplished.
Stiles is the managing director of a company called Emergent Method, a management consulting company based in Louisiana. The company works with a number of Nevada entities including the city of Reno and the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance.
The process outlined by Stiles has six parts.
Phase one calls for an assessment of community needs and assets which is slated to include input from both residents and city employees as well as focus groups and community meetings. Phase two is focused on identifying desired outcomes and phase three is when they plan to define specific metrics to enable city leaders to determine if the plan goals are being met.
Phase four includes discussion of revenue generation with a focus on revenue diversification. After that, phase five is when the actual new plan will be drafted and presented to the council for approval. The final phase is the actual adoption of the strategic plan.
Under the timeline presented at the meeting, most of the time will be spent on the phase one assessment of needs and assets, which will go into April. The completion and adoption of the final strategic plan is slated for sometime in July. Resident input is scheduled for February with focus groups and community meetings slated for March.
Councilmember Steve Walton led off discussion by calling for the addition of either special meetings or workshops involving the city council, noting that the kind of detail involved in crafting this type of plan could easily overwhelm regularly-scheduled meetings of the city council.
“I would like to see that included,” he said, “where council has an opportunity, in a workshop environment, to have a more conversational method of input rather than the formal process we follow in our regular meetings.”
One part of the first phase includes an analysis called, in consultant/politician/city staff speak, a SWOT study. For the less acronym-inclined, that stands for Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats. Walton called for additional opportunities for resident input after that study is completed rather than the study coming after the input period.
Councilmember Sherri Jorgensen also noted the need for as much community input as possible.
“We are a small community with a lot of input. A lot of residents really care about the way our city is functioning and running. I would like for them to have the opportunity for input and for us to be able to look at it and address it,” she said.
Jorgensen agreed with the idea of allowing for formal resident input after the SWOT analysis.
Councilmember Cokie Booth called for canvassing high school seniors in order to get the perspective of young people as well as actual seniors via the Boulder City Senior Center.
“What I’m really looking for is their feedback. Because sometimes I think I have a great idea and then when I listen to everyone else, my opinion is kind of way down here,” she said.
Councilmember Matt Fox focused on efforts to bring visitors to Boulder City as being a high priority.
In the end, this was just a presentation and the council took no actual action beyond providing their input on the process.