Council reviews 2025–27 strategic-plan updates; staff to tighten language, evaluate transportation committee and study Spanish-language access

City staff presented updates and proposed edits to the City of Goleta’s 2025–27 strategic plan at a workshop-style council meeting. The discussion covered completed objectives to be removed from the plan, a five-year financial outlook and proposed new or revised objectives.

Finance Director Luke Riel provided a high-level five-year forecast that, under a status-quo service level, shows moderate revenue growth but limited ongoing new funding capacity; staff emphasized that any program expansions would need offsetting reductions or new revenue sources. Staff also noted the city’s capital and project pipeline and recommended adopting a transparent process to fold strategic goals into departmental work programs.

Staff proposed limited text refinements to strategic objectives and a new objective to explore responsible use of artificial intelligence and robotic process automation in city operations. Council members debated several items: whether to keep an "Old Town visioning" process on the near-term work list (several council members said the timing and staff bandwidth made it unlikely to be implemented in the next two years and agreed to defer it), whether the plan should call out housing-element implementation more explicitly and how to incorporate aging-population planning and urban forestry priorities.

Council asked staff to bring more specific and clearer scoring definitions and to ensure the strategic plan aligns with other plans (creek and watershed, Vision Zero, ADA transition and forthcoming traffic model). Council also asked staff to evaluate how advisory commissions and community engagement structures can support plan implementation.

On procedural or programmatic follow-ups, council asked staff to: 1) analyze whether a standing or citizen transportation/circulation committee would add value and how it would interact with regional boards; 2) examine options for improving Spanish-language access to meetings and meeting broadcasts (including Channel 19, recorded video with captions or translated streams) and report back; and 3) note that an urban-forest plan grant-funded through a USDA/Green Latinos award is currently on hold pending federal reimbursement pauses.

Ending: Staff will incorporate council feedback, refine the redlined strategic-plan document, produce clearer objective language and scoring guidance, and return with recommended work-program alignments and the results of staff analyses of a transportation/circulation committee and Spanish-language access options prior to budget adoption.