City Manager’s Office
Reference: 2024 Strategic Plan Follow-up
To: Mayor Gregory Mills and Members of City Council
Through: Michael P. Martinez, City Manager
Prepared By: Kayla Barber-Perrotta, Budget & Performance Manager
Kathryn Mortensen, Senior Management Analyst
Date Prepared: April 30, 2024
PURPOSE
To present Council with draft updates to the vision areas, goals, and tasks for the 2023-2027 Strategic Plan, and to gather any additional feedback necessary before final adoption. This proposal is based on feedback provided during the March 7, 2024 strategic planning discussion.
BACKGROUND
In 2023, Council adopted the City’s 2023-2027 Strategic Plan. This plan encompasses long-term vision areas (6-10 years), medium-term goals (3-5 years), and short-term tasks (1-2 years). Additionally, the City Council applied five vision areas of safe, sustainable, intentional, transparent, and engaging as lenses through which all planned programs and projects should be assessed.
On March 7, 2024, the City Council conducted a full-day discussion to update the City’s 2023-2027 Strategic Plan. With a year to review the plan in action, council members discussed each of the vision areas, associated goals, and measures of success to ensure they correctly conveyed the intended purposes of the plan and still made sense a year later. While much of the plan remained the same, there were some adjustments to the existing goals and metrics, as well as the proposed addition of new vision areas. Following this session, the Budget and Performance Team worked closely with the City Manager and departments to incorporate this feedback and prepare a recommended update to the 2023-2027 Strategic Plan. As many of these changes were minor, they may be seen in the attached links to the City’s dashboard.
Two substantial changes, however, are the recommended addition of a Safe and Healthy Community vision area and a Partners value. Towards the end of the session, Council identified plan gaps including public safety, public health, and regional partnerships. In reviewing this feedback and how these items could be carried out through the organization, staff is recommending the addition of a new vision area entitled Safe and Healthy Community. A proposed vision statement may be found below:
The City of Brighton is a safe and healthy place to live, work, and play. Our residents can trust that the City is meeting or exceeding safety standards for policing, utilities, infrastructure, and other services. The City is working to secure our community now and into the future.
This proposed vision area is designed to capitalize on several safety and health initiatives. The recent work of the Police Department in developing its strategic plan is incorporated through mirroring key elements into the City’s plan that require greater citywide action and support to reach implementation. Additional goals address safety and health initiatives including an emphasis on crash data to help identify transportation improvements and water quality work that is underway in the Utilities Department. This vision area also recognizes the broad spectrum of safety that is required of cities in the digital era. Foundational cybersecurity work is incorporated to not only help mitigate risk today, but to set the City up for the next era of technology innovation including but not limited to artificial intelligence. The proposed vision area, goals, tasks, and measures of success can be reached through the attached link. If finalized by the Council, these will be pushed to the Strategic Plan Dashboard on the City’s website.
Furthermore, staff is recommending that the regionalism gap be addressed through an update to the five values by replacing Safe, which is proposed to have its own vision area, with a Partners value. Regional Partnerships was a vision area in the 2020-2022 Strategic Plan. However, in practice, it was a difficult vision to execute as neither staff nor Council could identify specific goals and tasks that best fit that vision area. Regional partnerships are generally not created for the sake of having partnerships. Instead, they are developed with specific projects and challenges in mind such as transportation or safety. In practice, this vision area was used more like a value where various initiatives were reviewed for potential partnerships to help in their execution, but the goal or task ultimately fell under a more focused vision area. This values-based approach has also naturally occurred in the 2023-2027 Strategic Plan through tasks including but not limited to work with the Denver Regional Council of Governments on circulation studies, Sable Boulevard Enhancements, bus rapid transit, and grants. By formalizing this as a value, staff will now know to place a greater emphasis on pursuing partnerships in carrying out Council’s vision areas. This value is intentionally left broad to open the door for not only regional partnerships but for partnerships with community and other groups. With this update, the values would read as:
We are partners, sustainable, intentional, transparent, and engaging.
Attachments
• Dashboard Links