On its one year anniversary, the city’s strategic plan is getting a public review. About a dozen Sitkans turned out for a town hall on Tuesday (12-19-23) where city staff launched a survey to gather feedback on how to update the plan.
Sitka’s strategic plan was created in 2022. It’s a five year plan that gives city staff defined goals to improve city services. Each year, city staff and the public will revisit the goals, then they might adjust or set new ones.
Municipal Administrator John Leach showed the audience a flier that listed the strategic plan’s five overarching goals: to improve quality of life, communication, sustainability, infrastructure, and service.
“I carry this thing around with me everywhere,” Leach said. “If you sit in any staff meeting with me, this thing comes out a lot.”
Leach said the city has made a lot of progress toward those goals. Many of the items Leach pointed to were approved by the assembly at some point– a long list of grants the city has scored in the last year, plus a housing study to see whether some swaths of city land are viable for affordable housing construction, and a tourism task force to address the steep increase in tourism Sitka is experiencing.
As for the city’s internal operations, they’ve invested in a new virtual HR system, and developed an asset management plan, which Leach says will prevent big maintenance emergencies by putting all of the city’s assets on a schedule for repairs and replacement.
“I like to bring up the Blatchley [Middle School] heat pump issue. It’s not that Blatchley did anything wrong. But that was quite a surprise to have to spend $600,000 like that, because the heat pumps may or may not have been maintained properly, or people weren’t monitoring and reporting that they weren’t working well,” Leach said. “And you can’t send kids to school without heat. So we want to prevent things like that.”
Among other things, Leach also pointed to the city’s efforts to increase financial transparency – through their open finance tool which shows city spending in real time and another web tool that lets citizens build their own budgets and send them to the assembly for consideration. He used the city’s fire department budget and school funding as an example.
“Everybody likes firefighters and everybody likes kids. So you can say, ‘I think we need to pay firefighters less,’ or ‘I need to cut down on that staff or reduce their budget,’ and you click on that, and make that budget go down. And you can go over to the school’s budget and bump that one up, and then it will tell you whether or not the budget is balanced based on the available revenue sources that we have,” Leach said. “You can completely defund a project if you think there’s a capital project we shouldn’t be doing.”
After Leach gave his presentation, he invited the audience to give feedback on the strategic plan and the city’s progress, either on a survey available at laptop stations in the room, or on sheets of paper posted on the wall.
The survey is available online and will be open for responses through January 5. Then, city staff will review the responses with the assembly as they consider how to update the plan.
