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Moab council workshop narrows strategic-plan priorities, seeks clearer timelines and staff champions
Summary
City staff presented a revised strategic plan draft and spreadsheet of 53 goals; council members urged clearer short-term objectives, timelines and departmental leads, and suggested pulling specific action items from master plans into the two‑year strategic window.
Moab City Council and staff spent most of their April 22 workshop refining a draft strategic plan that pares longer-term visions into a two-year action window and identifies staff champions for top priorities.
City planner Alexi, who led the presentation, told the council the team had taken a year’s worth of vision pillars, goals from the general plan and other master plans and organized them into a short-term funnel of priorities for the next two years. Alexi said the staff draft classifies 53 items as finished, ongoing, modified or removed and links items to their source plans and objectives.
The workshop centered on whether and how to surface action items that already appear in other plans—such as the parks master plan, unified transportation plan and sustainability plan—so the council and the public can see which tasks the city intends to pursue immediately.
Why it matters: Council members said the strategic plan should communicate what the city will actively pursue in the next two years. Several council members argued that leaving important items only in longer-range master plans makes them easy to “put on a shelf,” and urged staff to translate key recommendations into measurable objectives so the council can track progress.
Council feedback and staff response
Councilmember Jason pressed for more specificity on projects that repeatedly reappear on work lists, saying, “we need to be having this discussion together to figure out where we’re at.” Councilmember Tawny and others recommended keeping broad goals in place while extracting a handful of concrete, measurable objectives for the two‑year period.
Alexi said staff’s approach was to keep the high-level goals while pulling out the most actionable items for the current two‑year horizon. “We’re not losing things; we’re classifying them,” Alexi said, adding that staff would identify each item’s departmental lead and propose reasonable timelines.
Several council members suggested using small subgroups or work groups to dig into complex topics such as housing code changes, PUD/PAD amendments and trail connectivity rather than resolving them in a single, lengthy council workshop. Councilmembers generally agreed to prioritize five to six top items for the coming year and to brief the full council on progress more frequently.
Specific topics discussed
- Trails and active-transportation connectivity: Councilmembers pushed to retain active‑transportation and trail goals in the strategic plan, but to convert a broad “connectivity” goal into specific, measurable projects (for example, particular sidewalk extensions, crosswalk repainting schedules and wayfinding improvements).
- Downtown and parking: Members asked that downtown master-plan actions be tied to clear objectives so the council can judge when a “downtown plan” has been achieved rather than leaving it open ended.
- Planning and zoning work program: Multiple councilmembers noted that community development houses many interrelated items (subdivision/PAD/PUD revisions, municipal code updates) and urged staff to indicate which department leads each item and the anticipated sequencing to avoid overloading a single department.
- Linking master plans: Several members recommended a short statement in the strategic plan that acknowledges and implements high-priority items from the city’s master plans (parks, transportation, sustainability) so those actions remain visible and trackable in the two‑year work plan.
Process, timing and next steps
Council and staff agreed the document should be a rolling two‑year plan that is revisited annually and aligned with the budget calendar. Staff offered to return a revised draft that adds (a) timelines or ballpark durations for items, (b) the responsible department or staff champion for each goal, and (c) an easier-to-read one-page summary for the council’s top priorities. Staff proposed touching base at the second meeting in May and finalizing a recommended strategic plan before the June budget adoption.
Ending
Councilmembers generally complimented staff on the clearer wording and requested more granular workshops or small-group sessions on specific clusters of items (housing, trails, downtown). Alexi said staff would return a revised draft with timelines and responsible parties for council review.
