Huron East Council Looking for Feedback on Strategic Plan
by Bob Montgomery
Huron East council is in the process of conducting a strategic plan.
Mayor Bernie MacLellan say he can't remember when the last strategic plan was done but he doesn't think they've ever done one as in-depth as this one. MacLellan says they want to identify long term goals and how they plan to operate going forward. One of their biggest challenges is getting information out to the public so they actually understand what the municipality is doing with their tax dollars. “Unfortunately, we don't get a lot of people showing up at council meetings and we want to get the information out so they understand what we're doing. If they understand what we're doing then council can get a response back hearing that we're going in the right direction as far as what the public wants or we're not and then we can re-visit.”
Huron East council has already had one meeting with a consultant prior to last week's meeting and since then they've had public meetings in Brussels, Seaforth and Vanastra. They invited the public to come out and provide input and they conducted surveys and received about 350 responses to those surveys. They also conducted a separate survey with staff and got 36 responses to that. The feedback from those surveys was part of the discussion at this week's meeting. And MacLellan points out this is not a one or two day process. The meeting this week was just the second step in a longer process that will result in a long term plan that they can give to the public to understand what direction they’re going for the future.
The Mayor says last week's meeting was essentially five hours of going over the surveys in small workshops to help them determine the needs of the people going forward. Once the consultants put all of that information together, they'll meet with the CAO and establish time lines for what they feel needs to be done and who would be involved. After that, they'll have another meeting. He acknowledges it's not a quick process but it does take time to do it right.
MacLellan adds, so far he hasn't seen any major problems. “What we're really getting from the public is the direction they would like to see going forward and the best thing that I saw was the things that we're concentrating on were the things that they considered to be the most important. It was surprising how many of the respondents also said they felt more investment into some of the things that we've been concentrating on is something they consider legitimate and want to see happen.” MacLellan says that was very encouraging and he's been very pleased with the process.
