Over the course of four, four-hour meetings in November, City Council met to define its vision for the future of Georgetown.

“What council wanted to do was create a roadmap for future success, and we also wanted to re-establish the role of City Council and the role of city manager and the staff,” Mayor Dale Ross said. “I was all for this because you don’t know where you’re going unless you have a roadmap, and the roadmap is there now.”

The city hired Rick Robinson, the managing director of Dallas-based Ramsee Consulting Group, to facilitate the workshop sessions that led to the development of the city’s strategic plan, which outlines the council’s roles, vision, goals and rules of engagement.

Ross said the plan will be used to help guide City Council’s decisions and will serve as the council’s direction to City Manager David Morgan, who would use it to prioritize projects and develop tactics to achieve the council’s goals.

“This is what we want to accomplish [at a high level],” Ross said. “The way this works is we establish the vision and the goals, and then David [Morgan] through his team, executes the strategies and tactics to achieve the goals.”

According to the strategic plan, the vision is to create a “safe, healthy, happy, connected, and truly diverse community where people can live, learn, work, retire and play in an environment where we have ready access, throughout our lives, to arts, culture, essential services and the natural environment.”

Morgan said a theme of the plan is preserving the city’s history while preparing for future growth.

“It’s something I’ve heard people talk quite a lot about—we want to protect, preserve and treasure our past. We have a rich history in Georgetown that makes us unique and special so we want to protect that and celebrate it,” Morgan said. “But we also feel like we have a bright future, and we want to be innovative and take a leadership position in that future.”

Planning a strategy

Robinson, who had previously worked with Morgan during his time in the city of Richardson, said he met with Morgan and Ross to determine how the plan would be structured and how to proceed.

“We structured it so the first session was defining the role of council and the rules of engagement,” he said. “That gives us a stake in the ground so when we start getting into the weeds, we have something to go back to. That helps everyone know what to focus on.”

The council also spent time identifying the city’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to help develop the vision for the city, Robinson said.

“That gives us a common vision … here’s what we want to create,” he said.

Based on the vision, City Council developed the five goals—culture, employees, internal process, customers and financial—and two levels of strategies to achieve them, Morgan said.

Top strategies

One of the strategies is to attract, hire, develop and retain good staff members, which falls under several council goals, Morgan said.

“The city truly is a service organization and is people oriented, so we are only as good as the people who serve within the city organization,” Morgan said. “[The council] recognizes the importance of having a high quality and maintaining a high quality staff. … That says a lot about the council and their recognition of that.”

City Council is in the process of hiring a new city attorney after approving a separation agreement with former City Attorney Bridget Chapman, whose last day was Dec. 15.

Ross said the council has six finalists who will be interviewed in January.

In January the city announced Wayne Reed had been hired as assistant city manager to oversee development and named Leigh Wallace as the new finance director. Reed will join the staff Jan. 25, and Wallace will take her position Feb. 8.

Morgan said another goal is to make sure all of the city’s customers, including residents or anyone working with the city, have a positive experience and good customer service.

“[The council] has done a good job of hitting where we need to focus—having a strong organization with good staff and making sure we have solid customer service for all the different people we call customers whether it be various types of residents, businesses or visitors,” he said.

Part of creating a customer service mindset could include creating customer satisfaction surveys as well as improving, documenting and communicating internal processes, according to the plan.

Other strategic objectives include creating a diverse economy and tax base to increase the percentage of tax revenue collected from commercial sources as well as attracting young professionals and workers.

Implementation

From this point, Robinson said Morgan will move forward with creating an operational plan that would outline tactics to meet those strategic objectives outlined by the council.

“You’ve got to figure out which ones to complete first and how to do that,” he said.

Morgan said some of that operational plan will blend initiatives that are already being used by city staff as well as clarifying the strategies in a draft implementation plan.

“We are going to look internally to put some thought behind a tactical implementation plan for each one of the strategies, and there could be some tactics that actually accomplish multiple strategies at one time,” he said. “We plan on developing those implementation tactics and further describing the strategies, because one of the things we want to make sure we do is have real good clarity between the council and the staff.”

The draft plan could be presented at a City Council workshop in early spring, Morgan said.

“We will make sure that we … are on the right track,” he said. “Once we get that [confirmation], our next step is creating a timeline for implementation.”

Ross said the council would use the document during budget discussions this spring and summer.

“It will be helpful,” Ross said. “It’s good to talk about in advance of the budget. … It gives clarity to David [Morgan] on the operations side. This is a guide.”