Durham council holds strategic-planning workshop; members debate wording on economic goals and where housing fits

Durham City Council convened a special strategic-planning workshop to draft high-level goals and three‑year priorities for a new strategic plan, with staff and consultants collecting council input for further refinement and community engagement.

City Manager Beau Ferguson opened the meeting and asked members to focus on the session, reminding them of the scale of what the plan will guide: “You have 2,600 employees,” and “You just adopted a $772,000,000 budget,” he said, adding, “My commitment to you as a council is that we will follow the plan that you eventually adopt.”

City staff and consultants framed the exercise as a top‑down review of goals and a bottoms‑up collection of priorities. Sherry Metcalfe of Budget Management Services told the council “today, we are all about big goals” and described the multi-step process staff will use: council input at the workshop, follow-up community engagement, a second council session in February and a proposed strategic plan in May. Consultant Warren Miller of Fountainworks explained the terminology the group would use and how staff will convert council “priorities” into objective statements for the plan. “When we talk about goals today,…