Thank you
Bob and I would like to give our sincere thanks to everyone for their kind words and expressions of love and sympathy, sent after the devastating loss of our Diane Marie. She fought hard and long and hung in as long as she could. We love and miss her so very much. Thank you.
Carolyn and Bob Ramos
Cloverdale
The city’s strategic plan
On Monday, Aug. 17, the Healdsburg City Council reconsidered its Strategic Plan for the coming two years. It had become obvious that the pandemic, and its social and economic impacts called for a careful and thoughtful review and reconsideration of the plan.
The revised plan, developed by Acting City Manager Dave Kiff and his staff, was a considerable improvement over the previous version discussed in the March 9, 2020 meeting of council. Instead of a long wish list of ideas, proposals and suggested outcomes, the revision was concise, to the point and contained many of the elements of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound) planning found in business, higher education and other governmental bodies. The revised plan has clearly defined goals and, for the most part, clearly defined and time-bound proposed outcomes.
Unfortunately, community input into the revision was negligible. No one from the city reached out to Healdsburg 2040, a community-based group, regarding this revision or integrating the SDAT recommendations for sustainability. Instead of making this revision the focus of a special meeting, or workshop, where individual portions of the plan could be addressed by the community, it was buried toward the end of a rather long agenda. There was a spirited discussion of some aspects of the plan among city council members, especially regarding a wish to revisit land use codes (something that needs to be done anyway) for the south entry area of Healdsburg.
As usual, community members were limited to three minutes of comment apiece during public comment on a complex and multifaceted plan. And, as usual, public comment took place prior to any discussion by council members. For the dozen or so community members who actually hung on to this point of the agenda, is was rather disheartening to be “muted” and not given the opportunity to join council in some of its discussion or, at a minimum, react to the discussion.
Strategic planning is a fundamentally important task of the city council. Initiatives and outcomes developed in the process will shape budget deliberations about resource allocation for the coming years with meaningful impacts upon our community. It is too bad that council opted to not give the revised plan and the community the respect and attention they deserved.
Charles Duffy
Healdsburg
