Council Workshop on Strategic Plan Saturday

The El Cerrito City Council will hold a special study session Saturday morning to further define the city's new "Strategic Plan," an effort to develop a kind of blueprint or road map to guide city policymakers for next 10 or 20 years.

The city has been collecting public feedback over the past six months in a variety of ways, and Saturday's workshop is intended in part for the council to affirm earlier drafts of parts of the plan.

The 9 a.m. study session at City Hall will include some limited time at the beginning for public comments.

The Strategic Plan has four main components labeled Vision, Mission, Goals and Strategies.

A statement on the city website describes the purpose of the Saturday session:

"The goal of the study session is for Council members to discuss and come to agreements on the proposed vision statement, organizational values, and goals and strategies."

The website also includes links to the meeting agenda and to an accompanying packet that includes details about the draft plan.

The Values section, for example, has eight main parts:

• Ethics and Integrity
• Fiscal Responsibility
• Innovation and Creativity
• Leadership
• Professional Excellence
• Responsiveness
• Inclusiveness
• Transparency and Open Communication

Each of these eight main values contains several defining components listed in bullet-point format that collectively amount to three single-spaced pages.

The process began May 1 when the council voted spend up to $45,000 on the effort, including at least $39,000 for a consulting firm, Management Partners, to work with the city in developing a Strategic Plan to provide a shared community vision or blueprint for the city's future for the next decade or two or longer.

The plan is expected to be far more extensive than the city's official "mission statement," which the council hammered out last year. And it's also supposed to be broader in scope and values than the nuts-and-bolts details found in the city's general plan.

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