The Avondale City Council held a strategic planning workshop on October 15, 2025, to update the city's five-year strategic plan. The session, facilitated by external consultants, built on previous stakeholder engagement and a prior day's discussions with community panels. Council members, the city manager, and department heads deliberated on the city's vision, strategic outcome areas, and draft strategies. No formal votes were taken; decisions were reached by consensus.
"In Avondale, we embrace the future with confidence by fostering innovation and empowering all residents and businesses to aspire, achieve, and accelerate to reach their full potential."
Note: This workshop did not include a consent calendar or public testimony period; all discussion was among council, staff, and consultants.
Councilmember Solario. Here. Councilmember Weiss. Here. Councilmember White. Here. Mayor Paneda. Here. And Vice Mayor Nielsen has an excused absence today. All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome back to another day of discussion and strategic planning. And at this time, I will turn it over to Nancy. Thank you before us I apologize. But first of all, I'm not standing up the week, and I think we have some other people who are the better intelligence. But I do like to start out with the thoughts. I don't know if you realize that we have someone that threw up the pitch. Oh yeah? That's cool. I didn't know if we were just taking it. I didn't hear from our fame councilmember Solario who got to throw out the first pitch at some games. So I got to throw out the first pitch. I'm a huge Dodger fan, originally from Southern California. So I know. So I was asked to throw out the first pitch yesterday against the Reds game, which is kind of big for me too because the Reds stayed at my hotel and I've known so many of them. So it was kind of really cool to be there while the Dodgers were there and the Reds. A little embarrassing at the same time because some of the coaches were there and they're like, we should have taught you a little bit more when we were there. But it went good. He caught it. It didn't, I didn't pull a 50 cent where it went on the side or anything. I made it, and um I'm like, I had pressure because you know Smoky the Bear went before me, and I'm like, if he has that big helmet head on and he can make it, I can make it. So it was really nice. It was one of those opportunities like I was telling Mayor, like he said you'll always remember. So it was really great. Well, uh again, thank you, uh uh Mayor and Council. So I just uh wanted to point out a couple things and and uh talk about how staff uses the strategic plan. So in your uh packet, you were provided about five pages of accomplishments since the uh last um strategic plan was created, and and I promise you that is just a highlight. Um Anisa and Tracy went through it to try to get it down to re readable uh size. Um but the reason it's not to talk about what staff has done, but to show that how important the strategic plan is and how we use it to guide our day-to-day decisions and how we assign funding, how we assign priorities to projects to figure out how we're gonna get uh things done. Working for seven bosses, uh just having seven bosses is sometimes complicated. This is the unifying document. This is the document that provides a clear statement of work, a clear statement of expectations, and a clear, in my opinion, a priority list. We use it uh to set agenda items, uh again, we use it to set funding. So it's just a very, very important document. Um, and so I'm looking forward. Um, this is my first strategic plan with this uh council. Um we have a good two years at least uh as a group, and so I I'm looking forward to the outcomes today, which will be a new uh strategic plan that has your stamp on it and will set our vision usually for at least two years, but often for four to five years. So with that, I will turn it over to uh our team and we'll go from there. Thank you. All right.