Moab council reviews draft strategic-plan goals, narrows priorities to five areas

Moab City Council members held a workshop March 25 to review staff revisions to the city’s multi-year strategic plan and provide direction on priorities ahead of a planned June adoption.

City staff said they reorganized the plan’s earlier “pillars” from the community visioning process into clearer, action-oriented goals and proposed five top priorities: enhanced community preparedness and resilience; protecting and enhancing city resources and public assets; improvements to downtown Main Street; leveraging the Walnut Lane property to promote affordable housing; and planning and funding small-area master plans to address deferred infrastructure maintenance. “The goal is to continue to prioritize policies and infrastructure projects to mitigate against known natural hazards within the city of Moab,” City Manager Michael (city manager) said during the presentation.

Council members and staff emphasized the need to preserve links to other adopted plans. Councilmember Colin (councilmember, first name only) said he supported turning the pillars into goal statements and recommended explicit ties to other documents such as the city’s transportation, sustainability and watershed plans so future work would reference existing studies and avoid losing prior commitments. Alexi (staff member, planning/sustainability) and Lehi (staff member) explained that staff has categorized 53 objectives from prior plans into four “buckets”: finished, modify/continue, ongoing and remove. Staff said 4 objectives are finished, 22 were marked modify/continue, 17 ongoing and several flagged for removal as redundant or obsolete under changed state code.

Council members pressed for clearer community signaling about what stays, what becomes operational work items, and what will be removed. “If it gets down to the point where it’s like open city hall every day and turn on the lights, that doesn’t need to be a goal,” Michael said, explaining the difference between mission-level strategic goals and routine operations. Councilmember Jason (councilmember, first name only) asked that environmental stewardship items — such as green-stormwater infrastructure, EV chargers and recycling — remain visible within the broader goal set, noting flood recovery has shifted community priorities since the original visioning was done.

Staff said the next steps are to assign each of the 53 objectives to individual staff leads, develop measurable work-plan items under each goal and return to council with timelines; staff suggested an early-May follow-up workshop and an anticipated council adoption concurrent with the budget process in June. Councilmembers agreed quarterly updates and clearer agenda summaries that call out which strategic goals an item implements would improve transparency and better tie the plan to the annual budget cycle.

Councilmembers and staff stressed the plan remains a draft and that no formal adoption was requested at the workshop. Staff committed to return with a revised draft, mapped ties to other adopted plans, and recommended work-plan timelines prior to a June adoption vote.