On September 5-6, 2008,
Charlottesville City Council
held a two-day retreat at the Stonewall Jackson Hotel in Staunton, VA.
Mayor Dave Norris
told Charlottesville Tomorrow that he felt like it was a very positive meeting. “The retreat was a good process that will help us focus our energy and resources for the next couple of years on several strategic priorities,” said Norris.
On Friday evening in a small hotel conference room, five City Councilors, five City staff, and a facilitator started with an ice breaker exercise exploring their personality styles. Facilitator
Skip Mullaney
said if the group understood their own personality traits, as well as those of their colleagues, they could build better working relationships.
In this specific exercise, there were four potential personality profiles and Mullaney was happy to see that City Council members and staff were represented in each of the four groups. In addition to a balance of personalities, Mayor Norris sees the current City Council as possessing other strengths. “This is a council that is very thoughtful and serious. It works well together, even though we don’t always agree.”
In the course of the retreat, Council members talked about how they think they are sometimes perceived as being of one mind on many issues given that they are all from the same political party. One councilor noted that despite being an all Democratic Council, they often do not vote unanimously on an issue.
The participants in the 2008 Charlottesville City Council retreat included:
City Councilors
:
Dave Norris, Mayor
Julian Taliaferro, Vice Mayor
Dave Brown
Holly Edwards
Satyendra Huja
City Staff
:
Gary O’Connell, City Manager
Maurice Jones, Assistant City Manager
Leslie Beauregard, Budget Director
Craig Brown, City Attorney
Ric Barrick, Director of Communications
Jeanne Cox, Clerk of the Council
Facilitator
: Skip Mullaney
Mayor Norris said Council has a tradition of holding retreats outside of Charlottesville. “It is good to get away, but not too far away,” said Norris. “A little distance allows us some mental space to think big.”
 Facilitator and Charlottesville resident Skip Mullaney |
Thinking big was the emphasis of Saturday’s all-day session. Facilitator Skip Mullaney conducted a “dot exercise” that allowed councilors and staff to assess how the City was doing on the eight major goals of
Council’s existing Vision 2025
. In advance of the retreat, Councilors received a ten page summary of the goals and the strategies being pursued by City Manager Gary O’Connell and his staff.
Mullaney had the group place a dot on a poster-sized target for each of the goals to measure City government’s level of impact and engagement. Goals with the most “hits” in the bull’s eye included efforts to make Charlottesville a “green” city and work supporting arts and culture. The participants scored “Quality Housing Opportunities for All” as missing the mark the most. There was little to no discussion of quantitative measurements for assessing progress on the strategic plan.
After the self-assessment of their current vision and goals, Mullaney moved the group towards brainstorming on priorities for the next two years. Staff and council identified a group of about thirteen major priorities. While the new priorities didn’t necessarily have to be aligned within the current vision in this exercise, there was consensus that the Vision 2025 strategic plan was a positive and forceful guide for their work.
After a lunch break, another “dot exercise” evaluated which priorities would receive “votes” from at least three City Councilors. Those that did receive a majority vote made it to the final list of seven priorities identified for 2008-2010. The new priority list below has three tiers grouped by the number of “votes” received by City Councilors. Tier I priorities had the highest number of votes.
NOTE: City staff will revise the exact wording of these priorities over the next month. The draft language shown below is Charlottesville Tomorrow’s best effort to capture the discussion at the retreat.
DRAFT City Council Priorities 2008-2010
Tier I – Highest Priority
Tier II
Tier III
Mayor Norris told Charlottesville Tomorrow that the retreat met his expectations. “It did. I was looking for an action agenda for where to focus our efforts,” said Norris.
Next, Gary O’Connell and his staff will summarize the feedback collected at the retreat and submit it to Council in October. A number of the priorities are already part of the City’s work plan and have reports coming soon to Council, including a discussion on September 15th related to housing priorities and a forestry master plan coming later in 2008. Norris encouraged staff to develop a tracking mechanism to measure progress and provide periodic updates to Council.
Brian Wheeler
