Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Strategic Work Plan topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
St. Helens council agrees to overhaul strategic work plan, add percent-complete tracking
Summary
City councilors and staff discussed converting the 2022–24 strategic work plan into a living roadmap with prioritized projects, percent-complete tracking and quarterly reviews to keep council and the public updated on high-profile projects such as the police station and waterfront work.
St. Helens City Council met in a work session on Tuesday, Feb. 18 to review the city’s 2022–24 strategic work plan and discuss upgrades to how staff and council will track and report progress on projects.
Councilors said the current document reads as a broad mission statement rather than a usable roadmap; they proposed converting it to a living project tracker that separates maintenance items from discrete projects, shows percent complete and includes estimated completion dates.
The discussion focused on making the plan actionable: council members repeatedly suggested a concise set of priority projects under each goal area, a simple public-facing dashboard and a regular cadence for review. “We need to boil it down to a few key areas,” one councilor said, urging the group to prioritize measurable work such as the police station and a reservoir site-selection RFP. Staff members said they can provide design and budget status updates but flagged that large, multi-year projects often sit in early engineering stages and are harder to quantify than short-term tasks.
Councilors and staff tested a template during the session that groups items into action items, maintenance items and completed items and assigns an owner, priority, percent complete and comments. Several councilors recommended that the project list be posted to the city website and updated by department heads so members of the public and other councilors can see progress without waiting for lengthy meeting presentations.
Participants also discussed how often to present updates. The consensus favored regularly scheduled reviews — quarterly or biannually for the full plan, with more frequent briefings on high-profile projects. Council members asked staff to incorporate budget-to-date for large projects when possible so percent-complete and dollars-spent can be compared.
The work session concluded with staff agreeing to clean up the document, remove completed or inapplicable items, and set up a concise tracker template for council review and online publication.
