Minnetonka City Council members on Monday reviewed the draft action steps for the city's 2026 strategic plan and signaled their support, with staff set to return with final edits for an anticipated consent vote at the Jan. 12 regular meeting.

Sarissa Seracchi, the city's senior management coordinator, opened the study session by summarizing how staff and roughly 40'50 employees used October and November workshops to draft action steps tied to six strategic priorities and 18 desired outcomes. The council's role in the meeting was to indicate support for the drafted action steps and raise questions; performance metrics presented are informational and will appear on the city website for public tracking, she said.

Darren Nelson, the finance director, walked the council through the financial-strength action steps: maintain very-strong Moody's fund-balance and net direct-debt ratings (the city is near 0.3% net direct debt), complete priority-based budgeting (staff have identified roughly 315'20 programs for cost allocation and scoring) and expand nonlevy revenue sources including updated sales-tax projections from the University of Minnesota Extension and a potential November 2026 referendum. "We have about 315 to 320 or so programs that we've identified," Nelson said when describing the scope of the priority-based budgeting work.

City Manager Mike Funk told the council that, under current state statute, a city seeking a November 2026 sales-tax question would need a council-approved resolution by Jan. 31, 2026. He cautioned that legislators are considering changes to state sales-tax rules, so staff are treating the matter as a "dual track" and will continue council discussions in meetings this month. "If we were to look to have a November 26 ballot question, you as a council . . . would need to have a resolution approved by 01/31/2026," Funk said.

Councilmembers pressed staff on how the priority-based budgeting tool will work. Nelson said the tool will use budget numbers, not 2025 actuals, for the immediate scoring step, and that work to define programs will help create a chart of accounts for a future ERP replacement. "This will clarify it and define them into integrated detail," Nelson said, describing how programs (for example, snow plowing or street sweeping) will be scored by cost and benefit and placed into quadrants to identify reallocation opportunities.

After discussion across multiple departments'including public safety, sustainability and community development'the council voiced informal support for the 2026 action steps. Mayor Brad Wiersom and other members praised the collaboration between departments and the transparency of metrics that the city will post online.

What happens next: staff will apply the tweaks discussed in the study session, upload metrics and charts to the public strategic-plan dashboard, and present the final document to the council for a likely approval vote Jan. 12, 2026. If the council chooses to pursue a sales-tax referendum for November 2026, staff warned the city would need to resolve timing and potential legislative changes before the Jan. 31 statutory deadline.

Speakers quoted in this article are members of the official meeting record and were present at the Dec. 15 study session. The council did not take a formal roll-call vote on the strategic plan during the study session; it indicated support that staff will memorialize for the January meeting.