Earlier this year, the city of Healdsburg embarked on the public engagement and outreach process for its next five-year plan, the 2020-25 Strategic Plan. Our 2020-25 Strategic Plan is intended to provide a road map that helps city leaders develop a vision for the future. A strategic plan helps us determine the priorities, procedures and operations to achieve that vision, as well as create consensus on expectations and provide guidelines on how to use our limited resources.
Here in Healdsburg, the strategic plan is a collaborative effort that involves you, the community, as well as elected officials and city staff. In the spring, we held a series of public focus-group sessions and in June, we presented three speaker events at which subject-matter experts spoke about key local issues such as affordable housing and economic diversity.
If you couldn’t attend in person or watch the livestreamed videos of the speaker series on Facebook, you can still see them: We professionally video-recorded the events, complete with the presenters’ PowerPoint presentations. The official speaker series videos can be viewed on the city’s website here.
Upcoming Community Workshops: There’s still time for you to participate in the engagement process. I invite you to attend one of two community workshops on the 2020-25 Strategic Plan. They will be held on Wednesday, Aug. 21, and Thursday, Aug. 22, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Villa Chanticleer Annex (860 Chanticleer Way, Healdsburg). Spanish translation will be made available.
The public workshops will feature the results of the recent focus-group discussions and speaker series. Attendees will also help prioritize key focus areas and goals to be included in the new strategic plan via interactive workstations.
Before the workshops, it may be helpful for you to review the current 2014-19 Strategic Plan. It can be found on the city website here. The 2014-19 Strategic Plan lays out five initiatives:
• Quality of Life: Healdsburg respects and values the diversity of its community and strives to protect and enhance the quality of life for its citizens.
• Economic Diversity and Innovation: Strengthen Healdsburg’s economy and tax base through economic development efforts that help diversify the business mix, generate jobs, retain and attract businesses and more.
• Effective and Efficient Government: Implement best business practices to ensure that municipal government operates efficiently and effectively while providing excellent customer services.
• Fiscal Responsibility: Develop a structurally balanced budget through long-term fiscal planning, maintain adequate reserves, fund ongoing costs with ongoing revenue, maintain competitive compensation, and set service fees based on the cost of providing the services.
• Infrastructure and Facilities: Catch up on deferred maintenance of city facilities and infrastructure, including streets, sidewalks, parks, utility lines and buildings and develop a long-term maintenance program.
Should the city of Healdsburg keep or change these strategic initiatives? What are the key issues and goals the city of Healdsburg should focus on for the next five years? What steps need to be taken to achieve these goals?
We’ll have thoughtful discussions at the Aug. 21 and 22 workshops on these and other important questions. I hope to see you there.
City Manager Update: Since 2017, I’ve provided a bi-weekly Friday Update on the various departments’ latest projects and news. If you want to get a good overview of what’s going on at the city, I invite you to bookmark this webpage, which lists all of our Friday updates.
We also publish this biweekly update on our Facebook and Nextdoor pages, so be sure to keep an eye out for that. And this fall, we will be moving to a digital newsletter format. In a future Cityscape, I’ll provide info on how you can subscribe.
David Mickaelian is the Healdsburg City Manager. To submit ideas or questions for this column, email [email protected].
