Salem city officials and several community leaders spent seven hours on Saturday developing the base for what will become a five year strategic plan for the city.
Salem City Manager Rex Barbee says the group reviewed the results of two community hearings on what city residents would like to see improved as well as providing their own input.
“Exercise was an attempt to allow city officials and members of the community to give us some guidance on where they think we should be focusing our attention. We’ve worked to create a vision/mission statement, some goals and set some parameters for who is going to be responsible for what regarding reporting back to the council.”
The vision statement adopted was ‘Your Opportunity to Thrive’. The Mission Statement was to provide the foundation needed to support the vision. Organizational values established were accountability, professionalism, transparency, active integrity, positive leadership, active communication, creativity, and being proactive.
The group also set six key areas that they will strive to make improvements and set goals. They are in order of the importance the group placed on them, economic development, housing, infrastructure, quality of life issues, city facilities and services, and clean-up of the city.
Some of the more specific topics raised as concerns that need to be addressed under the broad categories were downtown revitalization and issues with absentee landlords, connect students with local industries so they understand opportunities available, development of a new industrial park, better representation to get better assistance through state government, more services to assist senior citizens and the need for more assisted living facilities, extension and replacement of sidewalks. and developing more housing to handle the demand from the workforce.
The facilitator for the strategic plan will now prepare a report on the priorities to Barbee who will further develop a plan to submit to a vote of the city council at an October meeting. City officials will then be assigned to specific goals within the six areas of importance and will report back quarterly with progress being made.
