Fruits of the Strategic Planning session
CITCOM and several Department Heads met in a facilitated 10-hour, 2-day Strategic Planning session in late January. Facilitator Brett Tillander provided the city with a Power Point summary. From that summary:

New Vision Statement: Royal Oak is a dynamic balance of progressive vision and traditional values which offers an inviting, premier and diverse community for all.

New Mission Statement: Royal Oak provides a safe, healthy and sustainable community.

Goals, to be accomplished or evaluated within 18 to 24 months, address Communication: To proactively promote meaningful, open and respectful dialogue that ensures effective decision making. . . . Community:  To preserve neighborhoods by encouraging community involvement and family activities; and further to be recognized as a destination for entertainment, recreation and cultural opportunities. There are similarly constructed statements about the Economic/Tax Base, Fiscal Management, Infrastructure, and Public Safety.

Objectives are assigned for each Goal. Typical concepts: Promote neighborhood associations . . .  Use mobile community meetings, one each in March and September . . . Streamline the Permit Process . . . Use DDA/Chamber to promote commercial aspect of city . . . Prioritize Services . . . Define labor strategy . . . Lobby the State for relief re: Act 57, Act 312, Proposal "A", Headlee Amendment, and Local Drink Tax . . . Enact City Hall modification plan . . . Explore: feasibility of a public safety millage . . . public safety staffing levels . . . consolidation of dispatch and lock-up facilities . . . privatization, consolidation, and reorganization of services, including the use of part-time employees.

CITCOM, Department Heads plan strategy
Royal Oak's "rulers" began, Friday afternoon, a Retreat-like meeting to address long-range strategy. The poor guys and three gals were doomed to four hours of work which were to be followed by another six hours on Saturday. The city commission, city manager, and seven or eight department heads were guided through the exercise by facilitator Brett Tillander, well-known head of the Boys & Girls Club.

Brett politely told the participants they were expected to control their understandable tendency to go on "for hours and days" about the serious matters to be discussed. He used the familiar  retreat-technique of starting the day with a fun ice-breaker exercise to get them moving about the room talking to each other and to the five outsiders in the room: civic activists Bill Shaw and Brendan Wehrung, Royal Oak Review writer Jeremy Carroll, Fire fighter/Shift Captain Don Stehlin, and me.

"Take your hat off," Tillander said, encouraging each participant to avoid approaching dialogue from only the mindset of his/her specific role in city government. In broad outline, the group is to redefine the existing commission-developed mission and vision statement "in terms of the entire city, not just of the commission." For Saturday, the group was to be divided into three subsets to address six previously determined "core" topics, of which taxes/revenues is one.

On Friday, they were divided into two groups, one each for the mission and the vision statement. I had to leave just after they reassembled, but I'm sure that The Review will report the substance of the meeting. Shaw and Wehrung had indicated they would be addressing their rulers during Public Comment at the end of the session.

The strategy dialogue was held in "Beaumont University," a set of classrooms in the National City Center, in Troy. Use of the facility is without cost to the City Of Royal Oak. -- 22 Jan 10