Why Strategic Planning

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Why Strategic Planning is Needed

City of Snohomish

Strategic Planning Process for 2006

Situation assessment and current City issues and needs

As part of the 2006 Adopted Budget, the City Council has endorsed a proposal to develop a Strategic Plan for the City during this year. The overall purpose of this process is to better identify strategic opportunities for sustaining and improving City services into the future. Among the most basic questions we need to ask in this study are what services, if any, do we seek to improve and at what pace should we seek to make any improvements? Also, should any new revenues be targeted primarily for services, or for capital projects or some mixture of each? It is our expectation that specific answers to these questions will give the City Council, community and staff a strategic plan driven by defined service levels and performance measures. This is an ambitious project that will demand considerable involvement by the City Council, community leaders and the staff in order for a useful product to be developed by the end of the calendar year.

The time frame proposed for this Strategic Plan would look out to five-year, ten-year and twenty-year horizons in declining levels of detail. The primary five-year planning process would provide the greatest degree of specificity and would result in one-year action plans being incorporated into each year of the City’s adopted budgets for 2007-2011. The ten-year and twenty-year horizons would be included in order to keep our “high beams” on the path of the future and help ensure that any foreseeable opportunities or challenges in the distance are not ignored. It is a proposed process that once completed may be updated every five years to keep it current and functional. In this way, the strategic plan will become an active part of ongoing budget decisions well beyond the initial five-year plan.

For a number of reasons, 2006 appears to be an ideal time to engage the community with this process. Below are some key reasons why this is such an opportune time for strategic planning:

The City is entering an era of higher levels of both residential and commercial growth with subsequent dual impacts of higher service demands and higher anticipated revenues;
With projections of at least modest operating budget surpluses in the future, the opportunity exists to determine how such surpluses should be invested into City operational programs and capital projects that meet current and future community needs;
The City’s operational budgets are highly sensitive to the number of employee positions and resulting changes in costs of labor, which are affected also by economic factors including inflation rates and costs of benefit programs;
Ongoing revenues from residential growth often is viewed as not sufficient to pay the long-term costs of City services and capital improvements demanded by such population growth;
Critical planning may be needed to encourage the pace of economic development at a level where it adequately supports the rate of residential growth and expectations for improved services;
Key City facilities (Police, Public Works and City Hall) are buildings either converted from other uses (bank and post office) and/or are strained beyond initial remodel and design limits, suggesting that decisions on adequacy of these facilities need to be made consistent with decisions on staffing and service levels for the community;
Pressures for development within the City’s established UGA, as well as pressures to expand the UGA highlight the need to plan annexation priorities so that services are adequate for both existing and new areas of the City;
A broad-based visioning process in the community is long overdue to involve the community’s citizens, leaders and businesses in a far-reaching effort to assess the quality of life issues that City policies may impact;
No assessment appears to have ever been made that defines the City’s service standard levels or the scope of core services including a prioritization of services that may also be used for service reductions in future in the event of insufficient revenues;
Strategic planning will assist the City in establishing measurable performance standards to assist the City Council and staff in delivering the most affordable, efficient and responsive services to citizens.

Our Strategic Planning Horizons

Short-term: 5-year horizon for focused strategic planning

	Focus on specific, near-term trends, projections and needs
	Develop prioritized list of proposed service improvements or capital investments
	Develop action plans for each year
	Create performance measurements to assess implementation success
	Create the means to update the action plans at the end of each five-year increment

Mid-term: 10-year horizon for longer-term assessment and facilities planning

	Focus on identifiable trends and potential impacts/needs
	Establish economic analyses based on projections of short-term trends

Long-term: 20-year horizon for longest-term general assessments/projections

Focus on generalized, long-term trends and potential impacts/needs

Establish impacts of potential long-range trends and economic developments

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