Durango City Council’s policy goals changed this week for the first time in five years, despite an almost $30 million revenue increase since 2014.
Most of the money the city spends to keep services and maintain infrastructure comes from taxpayers, and financial direction comes from goals established by the City Council each year. The objectives are designed to be overarching and strategic guides for city investment in staff time and resources.
Since 2014, councilors kept the same four goals for city staff, each with three objectives by which to achieve the goals. In short, the goals are: promote community sustainability; foster civic engagement and democracy; demonstrate government performance; and envision Durango’s sense of place.
Two new councilors, Kim Baxter and Barbara Noseworthy, encouraged colleagues to set more specific and measurable goals after their election in April. Mayor Melissa Youssef criticized the existing goals in an op-ed in The Durango Herald earlier this year, saying they “are broad, big-picture goals and don’t provide focused and measurable objectives for city staff.”
Now, after more than a dozen hours of meetings during at least four days of work, city staff have synthesized City Council’s policy plans into five goals described by dozens of objectives.
“I feel like it’s very good forward movement, and I’d like to acknowledge the hard work of council,” Youssef said in a brief discussion of the goals at Tuesday’s regular City Council meeting before they were adopted by resolutions. “These will continue to be wordsmithed as we go, but this is a good point to bring them to discussion and possible resolution.”
Although policy behind the new goals hasn’t changed much, the new document provides more detail.
Establishing Durango’s identity, for example, will continue to be a goal. But the goal’s objectives in the 2019-20 proposal are more specific.
A previous objective sought to “maintain Durango’s sense of identity.” The new council got more specific with its proposal of “identifying an iconic feature (physical structure or activity) that becomes a symbol of Durango,” according to the draft goals.
Other specific policy objectives include:
Explore funding options for a regional housing authority or similar model.Consider homeless strategy being part of any proposed regional housing authority.Create an Urban Renewal Authority.Develop incentives for public/private partnerships.Explore feasibility of a performing arts and convention center.Appropriate funds for departments to achieve key performance indicators for sustainability and renewable energy development.Identify possible locations, design options and funding sources for an adequate police station.Adopt a stormwater management plan.Determine reserve balances and develop initiatives to fund them.“Once our overarching, big-picture goals are fine-tuned and in place, we can begin working with city staff to nail down precise goals and quantifiable expectations for them,” Mayor Youssef wrote in the op-ed in the Herald. “In this way, we believe we can provide the strategic vision and direction from the top down that our city needs.”
bhauff@durangoherald.com
