Charles River advisory board reviews draft strategic plan, adds tobacco compliance-check goal

The Charles River Public Health District advisory board reviewed draft strategic-plan materials and internal performance metrics at the fifth meeting in a six-part series, and agreed to add a new goal to the tobacco-use-prevention section requiring coordinated vendor compliance checks.

The change matters because the advisory board intends to vote on the plan at the final meeting and to transmit a work plan and budget to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Arissa Romano, facilitator with BME Strategies, summarized the session’s purpose: "The big goal for today's meeting is really just to review performance metrics, which will be new to everyone, and then really review the draft strategic plan and kind of go through the content together." The board set a two-step voting approach at the next meeting: one vote to approve the final document and a second to adopt implementation authority while allowing later amendments.

Advisory-board members spent most of the meeting reviewing internally focused performance measures meant for tracking progress, not…