The Governing Body met in a work session on September 19, 2025, at 1:30 PM in Council Chambers to receive updates on the 2023-2028 Strategic Plan, review the 2025 Citizen Survey results, and discuss the City Manager's goals and priorities for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. No public comment was taken. The session lasted until 2:32 PM.
Ryan Chavez, Assistant to the City Manager for Policy and Planning, presented an update on the 2023-2028 Strategic Plan, highlighting progress across five key service areas: Quality of Life, Community & Economic Development, Infrastructure, Public Safety, and Organizational Excellence. Key accomplishments include:
Mayor Hull expressed satisfaction with progress, noting the city is on a positive trajectory.
Ryan Chavez presented results from the 2025 National Community Survey, conducted by the National Research Center and Polco. The survey was sent to 3,000 households; 329 completed the statistically valid survey (11% response rate), and an additional 296 responded via an open link. The margin of error is ±5.4 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.
Key findings:
Mayor Hull commented that many improvements likely reflect recovery from the pandemic, citing increases in quality of life (77% to 85%), recommendation likelihood (81% to 90%), and perceived safety from property crime (64% to 90%). Councilor Wymer asked about the response rate; Chavez noted declining participation is common in repeated surveys.
City Manager Matt Geisel presented a 12-month planning calendar (July 2025 – June 2026) and a list of potential policy topics for exploration. He proposed five formal goals for FY26:
Councilors expressed interest in additional topics:
City Manager Geisel summarized direction: integrate a broad nuisance bucket (property maintenance, dust control, parking) along with civil monetary penalties and multi-year financial planning into the work plan.
Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us for today's uh uh work session. And uh if you rise for the Pledge of Allegiance, Councilor Tyler, would you lead us please? Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the report for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. You may be seated. Okay. Um ask everybody to please silence all electronic devices while attending the governing body meeting. For the record, I will announce the names of the governing body members when I say your name. Please acknowledge your presence by saying present, Councillor Dabson. Present. Thank you. Counselor Tyler. Present. Thank you. Counselor Weimer, present. Thank you. And Councillor Colbert is on her way. Um no public comment will be taken at this work session. And this is the uh annual work session, goal setting session as prescribed by the city charter. So excuse me, Mr. Can you please call counselor list for the first time? Oh, is she online? No. Counselor List. Okay. Okay. I didn't say Linantine either. No, we didn't. No, okay. So Counselor Lenantine, Council List. Okay, great. Uh let's see here. Okay. Um item on the agenda today is the 2023-2028 strategic plan update. Ryan Chavez. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of the governing body. Um, this is our annual strategic plan update for the 2023 through 2028 strategic plan. Um I'll get started with a recap. Our process to develop this plan began in December 2022 when the governing body reviewed the previous strategic plan, and then December through January 2023, we collected citizen and stakeholder feedback with town hall meetings and surveys, and then a committee was formed with representatives from each department to review all of the input and develop a new plan. From there, the proposed new plan was presented to the governing body in 2023 for additional review and input and was adopted in September of that year. Since then, we've been working on implementation. Um as a reminder on our vision statement, which answers the question where do we want to be? It's to provide a nationally recognized small community environment with robust amenities. Our mission, why do we do what we do and how will we get there? The mission of the City of Vision is to deliver high quality of life for all people of Rio Rancho through exceptional municipal services. The core values that we adopted are stewardship, integrity, safety and well-being, and respect. So within the plan, we have five key service areas, including quality of life, community and economic development, infrastructure, public safety, and organizational excellence. In each of those buckets, we um established goals and objectives to fulfill those goals. So as we've been implementing the plan, um, we developed a tracking system where we met on each objective and established either metrics or timelines to complete those objectives.