1
Introduction
The practice of strategic planning grew out of the private sector, where it gained acceptance as a means of identifying strategies for increasing corporate profits and minimizing the impacts of environmental change. The public sector also adopted it and has now used strategic planning long enough to have gained experience of its own. By now a body of instructive literature and a cadre of public sector practitioners know what works well and what does not.
Public sector practice still closely follows private sector practice. Strategic planning in the municipal setting prescribes a systematic process that enables a community’s leadership to understand the numerous future environments in which the community will exist, establish consensus about how best to achieve its most desired vision, and illuminate the actions that will most likely make that happen— all within the context of expected available financial and human resources.
Strategic planning for cities and counties is a never-ending process, just as it is in the business world. Every organization exists within several interlocking environments. For businesses, these include the industry and the relevant markets. For communities, environments may be local, state, regional, national, and even global.
Complexity
Each community environment is influenced by a series of factors: the economy, financial considerations, technology, ecology, legal and regulatory matters, and more. Communities can use the strategic planning process to consider how each factor will change, and how the community can take advantage of the resulting opportunities and prepare to minimize the impacts of potential threats to the public good.
Strategic planning in the public sector is usually much more complicated than in the private sector. State and local governments have broad responsibilities for providing services that range from human needs such as public safety and education to technical needs such as water treatment. The environments in which these responsibilities function are intricately interwoven. A change in one area often portends impacts in others: a public safety issue may be felt in the schools, and a loss of jobs will be felt by the agencies providing human services.
Concerns about the rapidity of change can be multiplied by the size of the jurisdiction, the complexity of its geography, the diversity of its residents, and the volatility of its industrial sectors. Counties in which numerous independent cities and towns are located often experience greater change—with greater rapidity—than do smaller, isolated jurisdictions.
Collaboration
In some cases, a city and a county collaborate to prepare a comprehensive strategic plan that covers both jurisdictions or specific services and issues that affect both. For example, the city of Columbus and Franklin County, Ohio, developed a consolidated plan that does not supplant the existing strategic plans of either entity but instead addresses their collective housing and community development needs. Even when joint planning is confined to a few specific issues, planners need to study the wider range of issues facing the partnering jurisdiction because those issues may be different from issues in their own locality. To prepare for their joint planning process, officials in both Columbus and Franklin County gathered information from a variety of sources, including earlier visioning exercises, and published goals and strategies of community organizations.
Dynamism
A community and its environment change in hundreds of ways every day, and strategic plans and the planning process cannot be static. They must be dynamic. This concept is vital to planning: many local government strategic plans summarize recent changes in an introduction to make sure that residents understand the context for planning.
Strategic plans represent the current state of collective thinking about what the future will be like. A plan that reflects the best thinking of a group of insightful participants—“two heads are better than one”—who represent a wide spectrum of perspectives enables a community to define the future with the greatest of clarity.
Care is essential, however. A group of smart, well-intentioned people, left to its own devices to reflect on the unknown, is likely to yield as much dissent as clarity.
A structure for the collection and assimilation of data and viewpoints enables a strategic planning group to extract relevant information and build consensus toward an accepted vision of the future. A well-thought-out strategic planning process can produce the best road map to approach the future. The planning has as much value for a community as the plan itself.
Art of the possible
Results of the strategic planning process must be related to available human and capital resources. No plan is useful unless it can be followed by specific actions that are within the capacity of the local government.
This handbook will describe the strategic planning process and provide on-target examples from local governments across the United States—some from governments of rural communities, some from urban settings; some large jurisdictions, others small; some counties as well as towns, cities, and villages. Each has issues and interests common to all, and each has unique concerns. Resulting plans will be different, but the process to reach a successful plan is essentially the same.
Both the content and the process are highlighted. Examples clarify concepts and illustrate exemplary formats. A step-by-step guide to the local government strategic planning process precedes the appendices.
For municipalities, much has changed in recent years. What is quite clear is that the pace of change will continue to accelerate. Local government leaders will need every possible insight into what is happening, why, and when to help their communities attain the future their constituents desire and deserve.