Are you looking at your thing?

No, just leave it this way.

Thank you.

I had the same thing.

Mine was all the way on the ground.

Open larger conspiracy.

Recording in progress.

Welcome everybody.

We are going to get uh started with our August 18th study session, and we have one agenda item, which is a quite lengthy agenda item.

Uh we hope to be out of here by I believe five o'clock, so an hour and a half to discuss the 2025 action plan realignment, and we have Mr.

Aaron Parrish to start us off.

Mayor President of the Council, good evening.

Uh really happy to bring this uh one item to you this evening.

That's first as you recall uh through the course of the year you've had some conversations around what are the strategic priorities of the city council.

Um you had the opportunity to evolve those, you had the opportunity to evolve your foundational principles.

And the next step really is to then translate that into an action plan.

So, how are we gonna bring those strategic priorities to life?

How are we gonna make progress?

But also as important, how are we gonna measure uh ourselves uh with that progress?

So we we'll go through some of that.

Uh again, you have your five-anchor strategic priorities of economic resilience, housing access, inclusive growth management, responsible environmental stewardship and transformational capital projects.

And at the end of the day, this is like your vision for what you want to see accomplished in the next two to four year time frame uh for the city.

I'm not gonna go through all those, but this is sort of the uh time that you've spent on working on developing those strategic priorities, and we're here today uh for you to consider the action plan.

Um, if you have some level of comfort with this action plan, then the next step would be to have it be formally approved at a city council meeting in September.

Um just uh giving you a little bit of cadence uh for how we work with the action plan, and there this team also does some work planning behind this.

Um, but we will bring this to you twice a year, uh, one time as kind of a mid-year check, and then the other is sort of just toward the turn of the year after we've collected the data uh for the year and just give you like a more of an annual update on how we did in 25.

So the next time you see this will be that uh turn of the year.

Um, how did we do in 2025 in terms of making progress on those action plans?

And a lot of the content that's embedded within here really is sort of in this two to four year window.

Um, realizing we have plans that go out 50 years, 20 years, 10 years.

We're trying to assimilate all that into like what do we really focus on in the next two to four years that we can accomplish.

Uh and you'll all do some follow-up strategic planning as well, uh, year to year, also.

Uh so I want to go through uh just from a formatting perspective, what we do in the action plan is each one of the strategic priorities you have, we put goals under that, and with each of those goals, we've put some tactics like what are we gonna do to advance that work, and we've also uh layered in some uh uh KPIs, uh key performance indicators that will help us measure that.

Uh so economic resilience, just starting off uh in this space, and just for uh a note, I think I'll take a pause after each priority and give you give the opportunity, give you the opportunity to provide feedback on each one of these.

And uh we have the team here, they'll you know, kind of take notes and we'll evolve that based on the feedback that we hear.

Um, but from an economic resilience uh perspective.

So the first goal uh really is to develop a cohesive city economic development strategy and staffing model that complements key economic development partners.

Um the second is really to lean into a tourism strategy, um, particularly in that economic uh or that uh evening and weekend space.

And then lastly, uh, and you'll see this one carry through all the uh strategic priorities, just what can we do to optimize city services in order to support the work and and how we uh help the community make progress on each one of these?

Uh so some specific tactics here.

Uh one is uh really just talking about that role in staffing.

So you've had a little bit of a light conversation in this space around the uh economic mobility uh item that's on your agenda, um, but this sort of leans into that.

Uh tactic two is something that you've all been you know having conversation about too on an ongoing basis, just like what is our regulatory role?

How do we balance you know, doing well in the community and providing you know great development, um, but also um allowing for an efficient uh building uh an efficient uh regulatory environment that allows people to move ahead with projects, both in the housing access and economic resilience space.

Uh business retention and expansion.

This really just leans into the idea that you know every solid economic development strategy that you've ever seen in a community relies on taking care of your existing businesses that are here well.

Um, how can you lean in and retain?

It's a lot harder to go out, um, get a new business to come into your community than it is to support the ones that are here and help them grow.

Uh and then the last tactic really focuses on equitable economic development.

So we've had a lot of work in the in a disparity study that we participated in about how we do city contracting and what our opportunities are for that.

Um we have uh goals in the uh WMBE and workforce participation space, and so this also sort of relates into how do we create equitable equitable economic development.

Again, also another tie back to this economic mobility conversation and how we can uh do work in that space ultimately and our procurement.

Now, just remember these are always goals.

Um we can't mandate um you know certain requirements, but we want to encourage, so maybe think about you know our role in this space as encourage uh encouragement.

Uh the tourism strategy, just kind of transitioning into that space.

Uh, this is really exciting.

I think there's a lot of council conversation sort of in this space.

Uh one is just events, you know, what can we do and you know, reconsider existing events, what can we do to promote uh current events.

We have a lot of partners in this space, so just an opportunity to think about uh events and cultural amenities that you know will help strengthen the evening and weekend economy.

Uh we heard a lot of conversation both in the council uh space as well as just in surveys and other areas about trail development, uh both with regard to existing trails and maintaining what we have, but also exploring other trail connections.