Despite more than a year of work and discussion, one city council member says he will not support Marysville’s strategic plan as it is written.
At Monday night’s council work session, council member J.R. Rausch said he cannot support the list of city priorities as they are ranked. The proposed strategic plan rewrite currently ranks the city priorities one through nine respectively, as economic development, finances, community safety, traffic, road and pedestrian infrastructure, community appearance, parks and recreation, enterprise fund management, communication and branding and quality customer service.
“I have a real issue if community safety is not number one,” Rausch said at the work session designed to finalize the strategic plan.
He added, “I am not going to support something that does not have public safety as number one.”
Rausch said “the number one founding principal of government is the protection of its citizens.”
Recently, council president Mark Reams asked council members to look over the plan as well as the recent customer service survey and rank their priorities. Those votes were compiled to create a collective ranking. Reams said no individual member had the rankings in the final order. He called it “a consensus ranking, based on everyone’s input.”
“That’s the beauty of having seven council members,” Reams said. “We all viewed them differently.”
Rausch said he completely understands that other members have different opinions.
“It does not need to be a 7-0 vote,” he said.
Council member Aaron Carpenter asked if there was anyone on council who disagreed that public safety should be the top priority.
Council member Alan Seymour said it is a “chicken or the egg” situation.
“You have got to have the finances to have the public safety,” he said.
Reams and Seymour each said that they looked at not only what was most important, but also how to address gaps in performance and expectations. Members noted that based on the recent customer service survey, residents seem pleased with the performance of the city’s public safety divisions.
“We want to keep it that way, but we have got to have the finances to do that,” Council member Henk Berbee said.
City Manager Terry Emery told council not to “get too wrapped up in this.”
“To administration, all of these are important to us,” he said, adding that, “We are really going to need to focus on all of these.”
Carpenter asked if a sentence could be added to the plan, noting the rankings are a collective rating and “not to be confused with individual views.”
Council member Donald Boerger said that despite the rankings, all of the city priorities are “equally important.”
“I disagree 100% with that,” Rausch responded, noting that mindset is the reason he is fighting for the rankings.
“They are all important. They are not all equal,” he said.
Rausch said that while community appearance is nice, it is not as important as public safety.
Reams suggested removing the rankings “if we are just going to get hung up on it.”
“Let’s just remove that ranking from the report and be done with it,” Reams said.
Brian Dostanko, city human resources director who also served as the strategic plan facilitator, said that council several years ago stressed they wanted to have the rankings so city administration has direction.
He explained that to have the plan ready for council, it needs submitted by noon today. He asked for clarification on what council wanted him to do, though he did not get it.
After the meeting, Dostanko said he has asked the clerk of council if he can “slide” the deadline in an attempt to get some direction. He said he will talk with Reams and Emery today.
Dostanko said he sees three options — move forward with the plan as it is written and likely have it approved by a 6-1 vote; disregard the voting process and rearrange the priorities slightly to move public safety to the number one priority, sliding economic development to number two, finances to number three and keeping four through nine the same; bring nothing forward and have council revisit the rankings at the next council work session in May.
He said administration “certainly doesn’t want to have a strategic plan that does not have full support of all the council members.”
He also said there was a voting process that should be respected.
“I don’t know if we will have decided which one we will make,” Dostanko said. “Sometime today we will need to make a choice on those three.”
He stressed there is a current strategic plan in place, so there is time to work out the details, though he noted the proposed plan does have some initiatives to be completed in 2021.
Most of all, Dostanko and Emery both said they do not want the rankings to overshadow the process.
“This has been a lot of work. It has been more than 16 months and I don’t want this to get away from all that good work,” Dostanko said, noting city administration and staff can focus on multiple priorities simultaneously.