Summary
Staff is returning to the City Council following the February Strategic Priorities Workshop to present three key lists for Council review and consideration. These lists are designed to clarify, compare, and integrate both Council’s original priorities and staff’s recommendations, as discussed during the workshop. The purpose of this report is to seek Council's direction on finalizing the City Council-approved list of priority projects.
Background
In February, the City Council engaged in a Strategic Priorities Workshop to evaluate and refine the City’s priority projects. The workshop was well attended by members of the public, who provided valuable input into the process and contributed to the discussions regarding the City’s strategic direction.
During the workshop, staff also presented a series of recommended updates to the priorities, including modifications to project descriptions and strategic category names, in order to better align with current goals and available resources.
The recommended staff list was created with the intention of making the project descriptions more actionable and easier to determine when a project is complete. This approach helps ensure that project scopes are clearly defined, measurable, and outcome-oriented, allowing both staff and stakeholders to track progress and completion more effectively.
Due to time constraints, Council and staff were not able to complete the discussion regarding which items from Council’s list and “staff’s list” should be blended together, nor were they able to discuss proposed changes to the strategic category names.
To support the next steps, staff has prepared the following three lists to organize the information discussed at the workshop:
- Original Council-Approved Priority List (Reformatted):
This list reflects the original set of City Council-approved priorities, reformatted to incorporate the results and specific outcomes of the February workshop discussions. (Attachment 1)
- Staff-Recommended Priority List (Presented at Workshop):
Prior to the workshop, staff was asked to prepare a staff-recommended list of priority projects based on their understanding of the most critical and important tasks that needed to be accomplished throughout the City. This list contains those staff-proposed priorities, which also include modifications to project descriptions and strategic category names, as initially presented during the workshop. (Attachment 2)
- Staff-Recommended Blended Priority List:
This third list represents staff’s recommendation for how to merge and balance the Council’s original priorities with staff’s refinements, creating a comprehensive and unified list that incorporates the input from both perspectives, as well as feedback received from the public. It should be noted that nearly all of the original Council Priorities remained on the “blended” list, but the names were slightly changed to make the project title read as more actionable. (Attachment 3)
Council Direction and Next Steps
Staff is requesting that the City Council review the three provided priority lists and consider whether the Staff-Recommended Blended Priority List should become the new City Council-approved list of priority projects, or if Council wished to retain the original approved list in its entirety, or propose a different combination of priorities that better reflects their direction.
Once the Council finalizes which list or combination of lists should serve as the official set of priorities, staff will return at a near future meeting to present a proposed method for ranking and scoring the approved projects as requested at the workshop. This process will ensure clarity regarding which projects should take top priority and establish a clear order for implementation moving forward.