The Columbia City Council held a pre-council meeting on October 6, 2025, at 5:00 PM. The primary agenda item was a discussion on refreshing the city's strategic plan, including the scope of work for a consultant, community engagement strategies, and alignment with the budget. The council also discussed scheduling future work sessions on tax increment financing (TIFs) and a transit study, as well as a legislative event.
Right? Yes. It is five o'clock heading call our October 6th, 2025, Columbia Pre-Council meeting to order. We've got a couple of things on our agenda, and up first is our strategic plan. So I'll kick it over to our assistant city manager Carol Rose. Thank you. Stacy and I are here tonight to talk about a refresh or an update to the current strategic plan, which was adopted by council in 2021. You have been provided, the council and the public have been provided with three documents. The PowerPoint presentation, which Stacey will run through this evening. The items staff are recommending be included in a scope of work. While there is no one size fits all approach to strategic planning, we the city are seeking a consultant to assist us in those efforts. And so we will be seeking council input on the items that or the components that you would like to see included in the RFP. You have also been provided with the strategic planning flowchart. And this was developed with the intention of showing council how our other processes align with the strategic planning process and how everything will tie in together starting in January, basically, when we have the community survey results. So with that, I'm going to kick it over to Stacy. We'll have a few decision items that were seeking council feedback, and that will conclude the presentation. Hi, good evening. So first, kind of just an overview. I thought we thought it would be useful to talk about a bit about our current plan and the process that brought us here, specifically the engagement process that we went through with the community with staff. We also want to review the proposed scope of work that you have in front of you and kind of talk a little bit about that, and then really focus in on the feedback that we're hoping to get from you all this evening. So our current strategic plan development for it started in 2018. We got input from not only the city council at the time, but the community and staff. The goal for this was to really build a plan from the ground up. That's something that our city manager at the time talked a little bit about whenever we were going through this process is that we would start with frontline staff and we would kind of uh work our way up. Um the goal was to just really get a lot of staff buy-in specifically. Uh for community engagement, we did a series of eight focus groups of those eight focus groups. Three were um just broad community-wide, anyone can drop in, and the other five uh really tried to focus on um uh a targeted audience. Uh total just over um just under 140 uh residents participated in those discussions. They were all located at the ARC because it's a good central location and also because it's on a bus line. Here are those specific groups, as I mentioned the three that were just general, open to the public, but we also um sought feedback from uh low-income households, seniors, youth, business owners, and individuals with disabilities. Um the honor system, we weren't like checking, checking birthdays to make sure you were you know young enough to participate. So those were um just you know opt-in based on based on your work that you fit in those categories. I wanted to just highlight these because one of the discussion points later on will be you know what what you all have in mind for um community engagement for focus groups as well. What those groups really focused on were they're kind of framed around these three different questions. Um how would you describe our community if you were trying to get a friend or a family member to move here? Uh, what do you feel the most critical issues facing our community in the next five years are, and what is the most important thing that the city can do for our residents? So each of those discussions were framed around these three questions. From the staff perspective, we started with line level staff, including a 65 frontline staff. Uh again, the goal of this was to really get a lot of buy-in from the ground up and just kind of build up from there. Um we really wanted to focus on making sure our staff felt like they um had an oper an opportunity to make decisions and that they could be engaged in the process. There are no questions about any of that. I know I'm really breezing through these. For our proposed scope of work, we kind of organized it into five broad categories: data gathering, vision, mission, and values, strategic goals and objectives, action plans, and then implementation and monitoring. So we'll kind of walk through what's included in each of those. And all of these you'll see a presentation to city council as needed. That's just to ensure that you all can stay in the loop throughout the process as much as you want to. Again, they all do say as needed, so it's just we wanted to build that into the RFP. So the first data gathering that would include compiling our existing data from our community summit earlier this year from the report of our community summit, as well as from that community survey. In addition to this, it would include a SPOT analysis, which is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. In addition to this, we would want to get good engagement from the community as well as staff.