During the Nov. 8 city council meeting, the council revisited its 2022-2023 strategic plan to analyze progress. The main focuses of the strategic plan, which were defined in March, are housing, city capabilities, sustainability, infrastructure, and community investment.
The city defined three key initiatives for 2023: to earn the public’s trust in local government, lay the groundwork for a city property tax, and spend federal funding on community betterment.
Staff also defined a number of objectives, including regulating residential occupancy, filling vacancies in the Moab City Police department, regulating noise impacts, working towards Dark Skies Facility compliance, and collaborating with Grand County on issues regarding Utah’s transient room tax.
Ben Billingsley, the city’s finance director, presented the status of the plan’s objectives.
“My goal for the last few weeks was to translate this document into something that was a little bit more manageable and easier to measure,” he said. “Basically to say for each of those objectives, ‘are we on track? Are we behind? Or is it something that’s still upcoming?’”
Billingsley created a public interactive dashboard for city staff and Moab residents to explore the status of the goals laid out in the plan. Status labels are upcoming, status pending, on track, minor and major disruption, and completed.
Billingsley used projects in the housing category as an example. Of the six projects within the housing category, considering deed-restricted properties was an upcoming project while regulating residential occupancy was marked completed. Another project, a “land use prioritization list” was considered on track and two other projects had the status of minor disruption: the ongoing Walnut Lane development and reviewing subdivision ordinance. Each project is also listed with a number of tasks, each with its own status.
Most projects considered as having “major disruption,” including regulating noise, are the subject of ongoing litigation.
The most common status for projects was on-track: 21 of the 51 total were labeled as such.
“We’re looking at providing transparency to those objectives on an ongoing basis,” Billingsley said. He anticipates updating the dashboard once a month.
The dashboard is available at www.moabcity.org/614/city-strategic-plan.
