A strategic plan for goal setting

<p>A newly constituted City Council is about to start grappling with some of the enormous issues facing this city. There is one piece of advice for all seven members of that august group, and it is this: the old way of doing things didn’t work, and it’s time to step back, think fresh thoughts, and give it another try.</p><!-- Nothing to do. The paragraph has already been output --><p>For about two decades now, no matter who held the majority vote on the council, the city has been groping in the dark for goals that have never been really defined. Individual council members, or small groups of council members, have had agendas, some of which have been pretty obscure. Sometimes it seems that there have been seven different agendas all competing at once.</p><p>The council has done goal setting, but it seems that there are usually goals focusing on pet projects or pet issues of individuals, but there never has been a consensus as to “this is what we, collectively, want for the city of Petaluma.”</p><p>One question that has never been really asked or answered is this one: do we want Petaluma to be a bedroom community, a self-sufficient sustainable community with adequate jobs and shopping, or something in between?</p><p>Our problem seems to have been government by buzzword instead of working toward mutually agreed-upon goals. On the one hand, we can hide behind slogans such as “we need businesses with high-paying jobs” or “we must preserve the uniqueness of Petaluma,” while on the other hand, we duck behind arguments such as “City Hall is driving job-producing businesses out of town.’</p><p>While each of these contentions might well be valid, they mask the fact that there really is little data available to either justify them or show the consequences of addressing them.</p><p>We have little supporting data to show which segment of our local population is most in need of jobs. Is it the entry-level person, the Ph.D., or someone in between? Or all of the above?</p><p>Of course we want to preserve Petaluma’s uniqueness, but does that mean that we should have no change whatsoever? Changing nothing could bring on the kind of economic disease that would in itself bring reams of unwanted change.</p><p>Is City Hall the reason businesses are folding their tents and leaving? Perhaps. And maybe the economy has something to do with it. Some hard data would help show the way to answers.</p><p>So now the city is facing the fact that there is not enough money to even do business as usual, let alone embrace many of the pet issues of individual council members. As the members start to grapple with these issues, it is time to put away the rhetoric and strive to grasp the consequences of any number of possible decisions, and that means the members need a solid bedrock of data and information to guide that process. </p><p>If all seven council members are working from the same database, they will be more likely to reach a consensus than when they are all operating from slogans and political rallying cries.</p><p>That is where the city’s upcoming effort to craft an economic strategic plan comes in. There are those who see a plan like this as a way to keep everything they don’t like out of Petaluma, and there are those who see it as a means to allow anything they like into Petaluma. Both miss the point. The purpose of this plan should be to pinpoint what is best of Petaluma, and what will assure a sustainable future. </p><p>It means, deciding what is best based on where the facts lead us, not on what we may fancy in our idle daydreaming.</p><p>The main idea of a strategic plan such as this is to first get that body of facts to help us decide. Then, perhaps, annual goal setting will be more than an exercise in self-indulgence. </p><p>(Don Bennett, a business writer and consultant, has been involved with city planning issues since the early 1970s. He serves on the Sonoma County Planning Commission. His e-mail address is dcbenn@aol.com.)</p>