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Pleasanton’s two-year process for identifying and prioritizing public projects, programs and policy initiatives will officially be a thing of the past after the City Council voted unanimously to adopt a new five-year Citywide Strategic Plan on Tuesday.
Now that the final draft of the plan, which has been named “ONE Pleasanton”, has been approved, city staff will begin developing an implementation action plan that will identify key tasks and timelines in order to move the goals listed in the strategic plan forward.
“I love the title … it really speaks to this diverse community that we’re all coming together, we all have common goals — even on the council,” Mayor Karla Brown said during Tuesday’s meeting.
In addition to the day-to-day operations, city staff are responsible for the consideration of different ideas, projects and services that are brought up by the public. Instead of approving these initiatives and activities throughout the year, the City Council had previously used a priority-setting process to better leverage city resources in order to meet those needs.
The approved council priorities were presented as a two-year work plan that guided staff and helped with financial resource allocation. That process aligned with the city’s two-year budgeting cycle and involved soliciting input from city commission and committee members, the City Council, and residents and other stakeholders to create new recommendations.
But because that two-year priority setting process had been in place for nearly 20 years under the prior city manager, City Manager Gerry Beaudin told the council last November a new strategic plan would allow for a more streamlined five-year version of the process.
It was during that Nov. 15 meeting that the council authorized staff to develop the new five-year plan to replace the old biennial council work plan process.
Since then, staff have gathered input from the council, city employees and the public in order to develop the plan. They presented a draft to the council at an Aug. 24 workshop, which also helped them finalize the plan.
“This is the culmination of really months and months of work that really brought together both the Pleasanton community with the city staff and the council members and really reflects just a tremendous collaboration,” deputy city manager Alexa Jeffress told the council on Tuesday.
While Jeffress pointed out that there wasn’t much to discuss during the meeting, given that staff have been working with the council for months on the plan, she highlighted several key topicsthat staff came across when talking to all the stakeholders in the community.
She said some of the most notable themes from city employees were on infrastructure and maintenance of city facilities, improving technology systems and increasing staffing levels, all to better serve the growing demands of the community.
Apart from gathering internal input from the city, staff facilitated multiple focus groups, pop-up events and other community input events. Results from a recent community survey were also used in the development of the new strategic plan.
Staff also hosted two bilingual focus groups — one in Spanish and one in Mandarin — in order to gather more diverse community member engagement to ensure that the strategic plan reflects the needs and priorities of all residents.
“Inclusive community engagement is really essential to ensure that our strategic plan reflects the voices of our entire community,” Jeffress said. “Pleasanton is a diverse city. It’s become more diverse over the past years, as our census data shows, and we really engaged in our community outreach efforts with this specific intent of reaching all aspects of Pleasanton’s community.”
According to Jeffress, some of the key priorities that the city heard from more than a thousand residents include housing and housing affordability, infrastructure, specifically water supply and quality, and public safety.
Other high-level themes that she listed were the importance of communication within the city organization and with the public, economic development, supporting the vitality of Pleasanton’s downtown, maintaining and improving city facilities and parks, and collaborating with nonprofit organizations, among others.
Jeffress also went over the city’s four main values listed in the plan: service integrity, inclusion and innovation.
Finally, she went on to review the strategic plan’s five multi-year goals, which are funding the city’s future through fiscal sustainability, optimizing the organization to ensure the city delivers quality services and programs, investing in the environment through eco-friendly and sustainable facility infrastructure, safeguarding the city through public safety and emergency preparedness, and community development.
During the meeting, Councilmember Valerie Arkin made the only motion to change the plan’s vision statement. The change she wanted to integrate the word historic into the verbiage so that it encompassed the idea that Pleasanton continues to honor the city’s historic character.
“I appreciate that comment being added back in. It is much of what defines people who come to Pleasanton,” Brown said. “A look at our historic downtown and our beautiful old homes … that’s their lasting impression is this wonderful, historic community that we have that it is our stewardship to take forward and continue to maintain.”
But as Vice Mayor Jack Balch had stated during his closing comments, the city still has a lot to do as staff now begin working on an implementation action plan that will help complete each of the goals listed in the plan before staff return to the council during the city’s regular two-year budget process.
“Sitting here today, looking at the implementation and how we’re going to carry that forward when the community members may remember the two-year process and prioritization, I think that’s obviously the staff’s heavy load to carry forward as we look to implement it,” Balch said.
