Welcome to business session for October 5th, 2023.

Our first item is approval of minutes for business session of September 28th.

Is there a motion?

Is there a motion?

So moved.

Is there a second?

Seconded.

All in favor.

All opposed.

Motion passes.

We will do the citywide business plan overview.

Take it away.

Thank you.

Mayor Lucas and members.

For the record, my name is Micah Intermill, and I'm the founder and principal consultant with uh Gov Strategists.

I've spent the past 20 years working in and around governments at the federal, state, and local level with a particular emphasis on strategic finance and management.

I found a Gov strategist at the beginning of this year out of the recognition that many of the challenges facing governments across the country are rooted in the same problem, and that is our world has changed rapidly over the first two decades of this century, yet strategies and policies are still solving for the challenges of the last century.

Quite simply, the work of Gov Strategist is to help uh local governments and state agencies flip that script and solve for tomorrow's future, not for the past.

So I'm extremely honored to be working in support of Kansas City's 2025 to 2029 citywide business plan as it aims to accomplish just that.

Before we get to the heart of the matter today, I do want to take a moment to thank Finance Chair Boo for her commitment to the process and ensuring this plan sets Kansas City on solid footing for the term.

City Manager Platt and Finance Director McQueen for their steady leadership and support.

Budget Officer Morrison and her team for stewarding much of this work quietly and but impactfully behind the scenes, and department heads and a great many city staff who have heavily influenced this work and will continue to.

Having engaged with scores of governments in the area of strategic and fine strategic finance and management, I can safely say that Kansas City's citywide business plan is a model nationally.

It provides for strategic and intentional resource allocation in service to delivering quality work that meets the needs and desires of the community.

Each five-year plan updated annually contains four core components.

First, an articulation of resident priorities.

Second, the city strategic plan.

Third, a financial strategic plan, and finally, a five-year planning model.

This citywide business plan was born out of necessity and the fatigue of living through successive one-year fixes in the wake of the Great Recession, and is absolutely best practice for thoughtfully planning for the future.

Today we'll talk about the strategic plan, the five-year and the five-year planning model in detail with focus on the general fund and uh capital improvements plan for the next five years.

First, we'll talk through the development of the strategic plan.

And it's not always true that past is prologue, but in this case, the way that we work and the way that we work through this plan was intentional and deliberate in rooting the results in the voice of community.

As you can see, we began in August with resident engagement.

We gathered feedback on goals, priorities, and residents and the residents' vision for the city's future, as we hosted four in-person sessions across the city and administered a digital survey.

That work yielded over 100 high-quality touch points that both mirrored and gave greater depth to sentiments found in the city's resident and business satisfaction surveys.

Next, we held a council retreat where you all uh convened as a team to set the strategic direction of the city by articulating a vision, mission, and values, and establishing goals and objectives for staff to execute on.

Then City Manager Platt convened department heads who work collaboratively to develop strategies to turn those goals and objectives into actionable work.

Since then, over the past three weeks or so, we've been working with city staff to finalize a draft recommendation which sits before you today.

Today we're sharing that draft with you, but just a word of caution, we won't be wordsmithing.

Uh it's either a word of caution or a word of celebration, depending on your uh point of view.

Our time together, though, is best spent uh thinking and acting more broadly.

Though we'll have the opportunity to work uh on the next phase, which is developing and drafting any amendments that may be necessary.

This plan will be adopted uh by the council by November 1st, as is required by Charter.

Just briefly a note about timing.

We have heard some concern that this process has moved much faster than prior council terms when the strategic plan uh wasn't updated until year two of a term.

I understand the concern with moving quickly and sometimes without complete information, but all of the action has truly been in service to making this council term as impactful as possible.

And as you'll hear throughout our presentation, there will be many opportunities to make adjustments if necessary.

Strategic planning terms are generic, frankly, and can mean different things to different people.

So we've used a specific set of definitions throughout our process to guide our work.

And for the benefit of today's conversation and any members of the public who may be watching from home, what we're going to do over the next slide is briefly review the structure of the plan and provide those definitions.

So the plan begins with three primary components that truly color the work of the entire city.

These three primary components define the organization's ethos.

We began by setting the vision, which is how we describe the future that we intend to create, or simply answer the question why do we exist as an organization?

From there, we we work on the mission, which we describe as providing a description of the work that the city engages in both today as well as tomorrow, articulating what it is that we do.

And finally, we move into a set of the city's values or guiding principles.

And through that work, set expectations on how the organization's culture will function and how employees should approach their work.

If I may, in a way that strengthens them quite significantly by adding clarity.

So kudos, kudos to you for that.

Beneath those three primary components of vision, mission, and values sit truly the meat of the strategic plan.

And that is organized into a section of goals or broad focus areas that answer the question how do we achieve our mission?