City Council to set ‘vision’ for year ahead

The Sonoma City Council is readying to prepare and publish its annual list of Council Goals.

City Manager Carol Giovanatto describes it as an opportunity for the council to 'set a course and a vision for the upcoming year.'

'To establish what their real priority topics are,' says Giovanatto.

Along with the annual budget, also due in June for the coming fiscal year, the city's Council Goals are an obligatory task that defines what direction city government should apply their efforts during the next 12 months.

'It becomes basically the overarching work-plan for staff and the council in the next year,' said Giovanatto. 'When we look at issues we ask, 'Does this align with council goals?''

It's not at all uncommon for a civic government to set goals, but Giovanatto has taken over the process and elevated it to a higher level since she took the job as City Manager four years ago. She asks that council members write up their goals and targets and send them to her in advance. She then prints them out on large sheets of poster paper, and at a public meeting each council member stands up and presents those goals.

'I term it 'roll-up-your-sleeves' goal setting,' said the city manager. 'I have found that brainstorming is an effective way to get the best results.'

The process gets all five members of the council to outline their vision of city goals for the coming year, and present them in a workshop before the other four members and the public. That planning meeting was held just a week ago, on May 23, in an afternoon public get-together with the council.

About a dozen members of the public were in attendance, and a handful took the opportunity to give input at the end of the four-hour meeting. (Subsequent information received by the Index-Tribune suggests there were only four members of the public at the meeting, and only one comment offered.)

'When Carol brought up the goal planning session, it was new,' said David Cook, who was elected to the City Council in 2012. 'The goals session is good because you can hear the tone of how other council members feel, what their number one priorities are. You think you know, but you don't.'

State law forbids council members from speaking about policy with multiple other council members outside of official meetings. That can make it hard to gauge another councilmember's position on any number of issues.

'What was really impressive with the last goal session we had, we were all on the same page – which you wouldn't think by reading the newspaper and seeing how we vote,' said Cook. 'We all want to have the same end result, but have different ways of getting there.'

Councilmember Madolyn Agrimonti said she 'enjoys when people share ideas.'

'I am a wonk, so this process was very comfortable for me,' said Agrimonti.

While in the past Giovanatto has put out a call for public input via a public announcement in the Index-Tribune – which she did again this year – a new vehicle for public input was added via the CityPulse tool on the sonomacity.org website. CityPulse is designed as a 'brainstorming' tool, allowing city administrators and elective officials to better understand what constituents think about almost any topic.

When the CrowdSmart team of Fred Campbell and Joe Aaron, both of Sonoma, presented the technology to the city early this year, Giovanatto quickly grasped its suitability for streamlining the public input phase of city governance, and launched CityPulse in March to gather ideas about the city's goals.

Its initial question was 'What do you believe is the most important issue facing the City of Sonoma in 2016,' easily dovetailing with the goal-setting agenda of the May 23 meeting. Some 108 comments from the online tool were submitted to the Council at its goals workshop, sorted by theme, an innovation that Giovanatto found rewarding.

'They really were useful,' she said. 'The council appreciated having that feedback.'

But CityPulse is only one tool in the kit; the purpose of the exercise is to get the City Council to agree on setting goals for the coming year. These are not just idle 'resolutions' like one makes on New Year's, but more focused – a road map for city priorities and action over the coming year.

Then at the end of the year, Giovanatto issues a 'report card' listing how the council's actions have met its goals. 'Every year that we've done council goal setting, we have an average of about 96 percent on accomplishing these goals,' she said proudly.

So it's not just a note in the minutes or a page in a PDF. The Council Goals are printed up and distributed throughout city offices and meeting rooms to remind staff at all levels the visions and priorities that should be guiding their efforts. 'We have it on big poster sheets in our conference room, there's one in the council chambers, at the public works yard and here at City Hall,' said Giovanatto.

At the next regular City Council meeting on June 6, adoption of the Council Goals 2016-2017 will be an agenda item as council members consider Giovanatto's synthesis of the May 23 workgroup. With that final chance to fine-tune it, they should be prepared to adopt the goals – and move on to a more gnarly issue: the city budget.

Contact Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com.