Good afternoon and welcome to the Hampshire City Council work session.

Madam Claire, we call the role, please.

Councilman Bowman.

Present.

Vice Mayor Brown.

Here.

Councilwoman Campbell, present.

Councilwoman Fairby.

Present.

Councilwoman Harper.

Present.

Councilwoman Mudler.

Present Mayor Gray.

President.

And we have a couple of presentations this afternoon on the agenda.

So I'm asking ask the city manager to introduce the first.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

First up today, Deputy City Manager Brian DeProfeo is going to give you all an update on the progress of the city strategic plan update.

As you all know, Hampton has a rich tradition in involving the community and giving us guidance for the future of our community.

And we have been working through various stakeholder engagement groups to see what our community members and other institutional and nonprofit partners believe is up next for our community over the next five to seven years.

Today we're pleased to give you a preview of what we'll share at the community checkpoint meeting on January 22nd, at which residents who have not participated in the smaller work groups but want to see where we're at can come and and hear the report and give their their input as well.

So Mr.

Proprio is going to give you all an overview of that, and we look forward to receiving any feedback you have today, and of course, receiving the feedback from our residents on January 22nd.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you, members of council.

As Mary had mentioned, we have a long history of uh engaging our community on the important questions facing the city.

Um the history with get engaging the community on the strategic plan actually goes back to the 1980s, and and every so often we have to update the plan.

Like Mary said, it's a five to seven-year plan.

And so whenever we update the plan, we engage the community to make sure that we are really moving the city in the direction that they want the city to go in.

And so it's important that we engage them in that process because they're the ones that we're trying to serve as a city.

One of the key things that we always emphasize as we go through the strategic plan is that it is really a community-based city strategic plan, but the city is not the sole solution provider.

As Mary had mentioned, we engage the community members, we engage the business community, the nonprofit community, and other um key stakeholders to not only help us shape the plan, but also help us implement the plan because the city can't do it alone.

So it's really important as we go through our strategic plan to keep that in mind.

This is not something that the city is going to be the sole um solution provider for.

How we're meeting those objectives that we develop during the strategic planning process.

Really areas that have transformed over the last 20 to 30 years.

And some of that transformation, or that transformation was really some of the stuff that came out of the strategic plan, and of course the investments that we are currently doing in downtown.

We also, our youth engagement efforts, a lot of those have come out of past plans.

Our focus on sports tourism, the 311 call center came out of past strategic plans.

And there are many, many other examples, but it's really important to know that this is what shapes the city's future and really what we work to achieve.

It's not just a plan that sits on the shelf.

One of the key things that we we've been grappling with like every other community, probably on the globe, is that we're really experiencing a period of rapid change driven by new technologies that are creating societal changes and disrupting his historic behavioral patterns.

And it's disrupting how we interact.

There's a lot more interaction through social media now.

We also how we work, telecommuting is more a part of everyday business environment, where we live, how we shop.

I know all of us shop online a good deal of time.

And one of the key emerging issues is artificial intelligence, and that's going to shape how we get things done.

And even as we were finalizing the plan, while we worked with the community members to identify the what of the plan, as we were working to try to get it into one voice, we actually were able to use AI to help us in that process in terms of how we say it, make sure across the seven areas and the seven different different groups that we're working on, the various elements of the plan, that it sounded like it was coming from one voice.

So and we've used AI and other other service delivery, and we're looking to do more of that.

So in terms of the strategic plan update process, as we had mentioned, it's it's really there's a great focus on broad-based community engagement.

We have stakeholder groups that work on our various strategic priority areas and help guide sort of what those look like, and I'll go through those as I get through the plan.

And then we periodically have community checkpoint meetings to just circle back to the community and say, here's where we are, what are your thoughts?

Are we on the right track and get their feedback and then incorporate that into the process?

We also include subject matter experts, and so if we identify any gaps or anything that we think that the community members who are working on the plan might want to consider as they uh as they give us their feedback and help us shape that vision, we bring that back to the community groups, and we say, well, here's something that is an issue.

Do you think this is something that we need to include in the plan, and we get their feedback on that.

So with that, some of the foundational pieces of the plan are the city's um citywide vision.

Um we've had this in place for a number of years.

When we first started this process, we went back to the community, we said, does this vision still make sense?