When it came to rating council’s priorities, participants in a public engagement session ranked economic prosperity as most important.
Banister Research conducted a “world cafĂ© discussion” on June 4 with 44 residents. Of those, 43 were recruited randomly while one unregistered attendee came unsolicited.
As part of the discussion, participants were requested to rank the strategic outcomes that council approved in early February.
From most important to least, the rankings were: economic prosperity, sustainable infrastructure and services, excellence in government, safe, healthy and inclusive community, historic, creative and active community and green community.
The details and summaries of the conversations were included as a report to council in preparation for a committee of the whole meeting on Thursday.
The final comments section of the report noted “participants reiterated the need for the City of St. Albert to increase the commercial tax base and decrease or maintain residential taxes.”
Banister’s report said participants thought council’s strategic outcomes were comprehensive but some clarity was needed.
“Going forward, City Council may wish to ensure that their approaches to each of the Strategic Outcomes are clearly defined in plain language, as well as ensuring that residents are clear on changes specific to infrastructure and the use of City facilities,” the report reads.
During Thursday’s committee of the whole meeting council had the opportunity to begin to tweak their priorities and strategic outcomes, a session city manager Patrick Draper said was “kind of a mid-year check-in.”
Council members highlighted what they’d heard in the world cafĂ© sessions they’d attended – the groups were divided up – and then used sticker democracy to indicate some changes to various priority-related projects’ timelines.
Staff is going to take the feedback from council and bring amendments to the administrative work plan and the council goals and priorities policy back to council in mid-July.
Coun Gilles Prefontaine noted some resident feedback as well as his own observation of council’s priorities and goals is “some of these are big, and some of these are really specific.”
Coun. Cathy Heron was a bit frustrated with the potential tweaking process, noting the goals and priorities were only adopted by council in February.
“We’re only six months away, and we’re already making changes,” she said, though Mayor Nolan Crouse pointed out their plans call for the strategic priorities to be reviewed a couple of times per year.
Finally, council had a chance to review proposed strategic indicators to measure performance on their strategic outcomes, and heard some of those statistics will eventually be available on the city’s website as part of the Statracker.
Coun. Wes Brodhead said he’d rather hear a report on progress towards the priorities and outcomes rather than constantly tweaking.
“If we continually go back to reviewing, gee, that’s a lot of soul-searching,” he said.
