City Council is prepared to look ahead for the next 10 years, with the final strategic plan framework now complete and presented to members of Council Tuesday night.
Born of Council facilitator sessions as well as recommendations from the Baylor survey, the framework would serve to ensure motions brought to Council by staff would remain true to a consistent vision and goal for the city of North Bay.
With a working draft completed early in 2016, the city paid approximately $50,000 for consulting firm, StrategyCorp to aide in the process, with consultation periods beginning on October 28, 2016, up until January 18, 2017.
“It’s the overarching strategic document that will aide Council and the city,” said Jocelyn Deeks of StrategyCorp. “We started with the draft from council and staff, but it didn’t have community input yet, so after the engagement process we got the new plan. We streamlined the document and going forward we have a much more efficient operable document. The key thing is we moved from three priorities to five. The addition of two directly reflects the feedback we got from the community.”
From the original draft framework created by Council, the final document took the original three priorities of:
- Growth and Development
- Vibrant, Active, Healthy and Safe Community
- Prudent Operation of the City,
These three priorities were then reworked in the final framework, strategically divided into:
- Natural, Near and North
- Economic Prosperity
- Affordable, Balanced Growth
- Spirited Safe Community
- Responsible and Responsive Government
In the ever-competitive race between municipalities to provide the best community to attract prospective citizens and tourists, John Matheson of StrategyCorp said of the 444 municipalities in Ontario, each wants to claim they are the greatest place to eat, live, and play—a statement heard all too often.
“443 of them had to be wrong,” Matheson said. “They couldn’t all be right. There are 70 pieces of Provincial legislation telling municipalities what they can or cannot do. They’re all working from the same deck of cards. At the same time, there is something special that is authentic for the people who live there. They key to a plan is finding out what that is so a community can play to its strengths You can’t treat every place like it’s the average municipality.”
Therefore, they decided it was important to focus on the strength of North Bay, being one of the priorities: natural, near, and north.
During the consultation process, information was garnered from 900 participants within the community during town hall meetings, workbooks, an online survey, stakeholder meetings, and community group outreach. Deeks said they were pleased with the number of participants in the process and believed there to be a strong representation of various views in North Bay.
“The important thing for us was to have the range of tools so people could participate in the process in a way that was convenient and most comfortable with them,” Deeks said, describing how the variations in community outreach gave ample opportunity to hear different demographics within the community. “In each of the different ways we got very robust feedback, it was great to see people so engaged. Especially because the engagement tools we used were very qualitative and we got substantial feedback to use.”
Deeks said during the process, it was great to see how much passion people had for the community and the ideas brought forward.
“There are challenges in every community and we could see some of the frustrations people had, but also people genuinely came forward with interesting and innovative ideas of what they wanted in the future.”
Although complete, the framework is intended to be a living document, with staff reviews annually to look for opportunities of change based on new information or changes within the city and otherwise.
