https://citymanagermiddletown.com/2017/01/10/welcome-to-2017/" rel="nofollow - - JANUARY
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I hope everyone had a great holiday season and New Year and now
we all get back to the daily workday and 2017 projects.
I spent a lot of my first year in 2015 assessing where we
were as a city and assembling my staff. In 2016, we started with a
concept of rebuilding Middletown to sustainable revenue levels where every year
we have the funding available to pave our streets, fix our parks and offer a
great quality of life. We mapped out how many additional families and
jobs it might take to reach that sustainable revenue level.
Now it’s time to turn the concept into an action plan.
2017 will see the creation of a new Master Plan for the city. The last
Master Plan was completed in 2005. It was a very thorough document that
listed a lot of great concepts and ideas. The document also had
several fatal problems.
First, City Council and staff never really adopted the 2005
Master Plan as the vision for the city. We didn’t budget and plan using
that document. It often sat on the shelf in all of our offices as
something aspirational but not practical and real.
Second, the recession made the Master Plan almost completely
obsolete. As we got into 2008-2009, budget revenues dried up, the city
went into lay-off mode, capital projects stalled, and any aspirational goals
were abandoned in an attempt to minimize disruption to core public safety and
other services. Even if it was a good plan, the recession took away so
much of our revenues that there was nothing left to implement good new
ideas for the city.
The recession is over. Income tax revenues were at the
highest level in a couple decades in 2016. So now is the time to move us
forward again.
This Master Plan is going to be different from the
previous plan. The 2005 plan was aspirational. Pie in the sky
ideas. This plan is designed to be much more practical and
operational in nature.
We know about what revenue levels we need to take care of city
operations in a sustainable way. We know about how many jobs and/or new
families it will take to reach that level. This plan is first and
foremost, the plan to gain those jobs and families to reach our required
revenue levels.
I’m going to challenge the city in a way that hasn’t been done
in recent memory. I’m going to not only ask the hard questions, but offer
possible solutions to decade old problems. You’ll like some of it.
You won’t like other parts of it. My only request is that if you hate
some piece of what I’m doing, tell me why, but also offer an alternative.
Part of our problems in the past have stemmed from seeing hard problems and
just giving up instead of pushing through them. I’d rather fight over how
to fix it than ignore it and watch it continue. It’s easy to just
bash and complain, but that doesn’t keep us moving forward. And it’s well
past time for all of us to move forward together and finish fixing this city.
We’ll
start the new master plan with the sustainable revenue
framework I’ve been talking about for over a year now. On top of that,
we’ll add in the Community Visioning project completed by the Community Building
Institute and Middletown Moving Forward. The sustainable framework is
what we need.
The community visioning is what we want as a community.
As the visioning document is completed, CBI, MMF
and I will be rolling out the concepts captured in that document to ask
the question, “Did we get it right?” “What, if anything, is
still missing?” As we discuss the results, I’ll take this document to
City Council and ask, “Do you believe in the concepts brought forward in the
Community Visioning process and are you ready to adopt them in full or in part
as part of the policy of the city?”
If the answer is yes, then the famework and the visioning will
flavor the rest of the planning process. As we look at economic
development, housing, etc., we’ll want to make sure that each piece is
consistent with the sustainable framework and the community’s vision of what Middletown should
be. Ideally, we’ll create a document that is consistent throughout with
the needs and wants of our residents. Housing choices will be
consistent with adding families and jobs. Transportation choices will be
consistent with the community’s vision for pedestrian, bicycle, automobile and
mass transit opportunities throughout the city. And so on.
As we look at each piece of the puzzle, we’ll be rolling them
out to the public, discussing them, and eventually seeking Council support that
they are ready to adopt each piece as the policy of the city. Future
budgets and capital projects should reflect those goals.
If you
follow this blog, you’re going to hear from me a lot this year. Welcome
to 2017!