The City of Dallas has not, until now, had a strategic plan that outlines our goals as a city and provides a blueprint to achieve those goals.  I have been very vocal in my opinion that our city must have a strategic plan for us to make policy and financial decisions that affect our future.  Otherwise, we're always being reactive instead of proactively moving towards our vision.

I am pleased to report that at our Council Retreat in January, the City Manager, Mary Suhm, produced a draft of a proposed strategic plan for our city.  The plan took months of staff work and is based on the five priorities identified by the City Council two years ago:  public safety, neighborhood quality of life, economic development, customer service and accountability, and the Trinity River.  The Council spent two days going through the plan and refining it, changing it, and editing it to reflect our constituents' priorities and values.  It took a lot of hammering out and debate, but I think the resulting document will be a great step for Dallas.

Dallas' strategic plan will differ from most other cities in that it is tied directly to our budget.  Los Angeles is the only other city to take this approach.  Tying the strategic plan to our budget makes a lot of sense.  The plan is meaningless if we don't fund it.  It is just another pretty plan that will sit on a shelf.  By combining it with our budgeting process, we can see exactly what strategic goals we can fund and those we cannot.  We can measure the success of programs that are intended to achieve our goals.

Here's how the strategic plan works.  The strategic plan document is divided into various sections (public safety, economic development, transportation, etc.).  Within each section, there are specific goals to be achieved, and objective benchmarks to determine whether those goals are achieved and to what extent.

Staff is revising the plan based on Council input, and we'll get a new draft in late March or early April.  As staff begins preparing next year's budget (our budget runs from Oct. 2006 to Sept. 2007), different departments and workgroups within those departments will submit "bids" to fulfill the various goals that the Council has set forth in the strategic plan.

One of the challenges we faced during the retreat is that we Councilmembers had to grow accustomed to just providing the end goal to be achieved, rather than suggesting specific tools to use to achieve that result.  This is a shift in thinking, I believe.  But that is really our job -- to develop public policy, to steer the ship, not to micromanage specific programs.  That, we can leave to our City Manager and city staff.  And with this strategic plan/budget process, the city is held accountable for achieving specific results.

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