Mayor Al McDonald and City Council members have been working on a strategic plan framework for the future of North Bay.
The Mayor and Councillors have been working on the plan since September.
“This is a strategic framework that council came up with for the next 10 years, it’s phase one so they have identified a lot of the priorities they would like to see for the city,” said McDonald.
“The second is to have a complete strategic city plan and that involves reaching out to the community at large, all the stakeholders to engage them and let them tell us where they would like to see the city in 10 years time so what we recognize is if we want to be successful as a city we need to be united not only as a council and staff but as a community as well.”
McDonald says the framework focusses on making North Bay a better place to live, work, play and learn. The city has identified key areas of concentration as economic growth, a vibrant, active, safe community and a prudently operated city.
“Right now we have completed phase one, that took us five months to create the strategic framework of council,” said McDonald.
“We are going to go through an RFP process through the summer time to come up with a plan on how do we engage the public. We didn’t want to do it in the summer time when nobody is paying attention so we are going to use September through November to create and engage our public to create that vision and then once we have all that information we are going to task our senior staff with putting the strategic plan together to help us achieve what the community truly wants.”
Part of the process will include the hiring of an Engagement Specialist. A motion will be made at Council Monday to approve that creation of the position.
“It is an RFP process that will take much of the summer to complete and we want to be ready to go in September when everybody comes back to work off of holidays,” said the Mayor.
McDonald admits that some of the ideas that are part of this Framework come from the recommendations made by the Baylor Report.
“There are some aspects of that, we started this in September so one of the things we knew that we needed to have was a strategic plan moving forward we said that we wanted better communication so yes there is a lot of stuff in there that is actually what Baylor confirmed that we should do that council should be working on so yes we are trying to cover off all our bases but it’s truly important we hear from our community,” said McDonald.
For the entire Strategic Plan Framework document go here: http://www.cityofnorthbay.ca/news/city-council-s-strategic-plan-framework/
