"Best in Class" – Strategic Plan - 2007 and Beyond

In a quest to better serve the community, the City of Spokane has completed an update to its Strategic Plan. This includes a new vision statement:

"A city near nature, unequaled for living, working, learning and leisure."

This vision statement is linked with the City's mission:

"To deliver efficient and effective services that facilitate economic opportunity and enhance quality of life."

In order to provide "Best in Class" services, we believe there are certain values we must strive to uphold. Those values are:

• Trust: We are committed to earn, maintain, and enhance the trust of each other and the community.
• Integrity: We conduct our work in an atmosphere of honesty, respect, and courtesy.
• Quality: We will provide excellent service in a cost-effective manner.
• Teamwork: We nurture successful working relationships with all our partners.
• Accountability: We take responsibility for our actions.
• Openness: Our actions are transparent to all our citizens and ourselves.
• Innovation: We encourage and support new ideas and creative approaches.
• Diversity: We respect the uniqueness of our employees and citizens.
• Community: We believe in our employees and our citizens.

These ideals pose an umbrella for the changes within the City, which are occurring to create a "Best in Class" organization. The future changes that will take place within the City are created with the intention to better serve our customer base. We have defined the customers for the City of Spokane to include:

Citizens of Spokane; Interested Stakeholders--Businesses, Neighborhoods, Board & Commission volunteers; Education Institutions, etc.; City Employees and Departments; Visitors to Spokane; Citizens of the surrounding cities, Spokane County, and the entire region.

Mayor Hession and senior leadership in the City have, with the help of employees, identified four top priorities which include: Customer Service, Economic Growth, Quality of Life, and Financial Stability.

The following is a discussion of our top priorities.

Customer Service: Provide Outstanding, Affordable Service to our Citizens - "Spokane Serves"

The City of Spokane has the responsibility to provide excellent service to the public. The customer service initiative is designed to implement a creative, streamlined approach to deliver City of Spokane services to its citizens. It is designed to minimize the number of times our customers need to interact with us to obtain services or receive answers to inquiries; to follow through on issues until they are resolved and citizens' needs are met; and to work together internally and with our external customers to deliver services.

Customer feedback helps us measure whether our services are meeting public needs and expectations. It helps identify problems that need to be resolved. While praise is always welcomed, constructive criticism is truly helpful towards improving what we do.

Several programs are being initiated within the "Spokane Serves" customer service initiative:

Customer Relations Management: Ask Spokane

• A customer service center is being established. This service center will be the focal point for receiving and tracking requests for services, receiving complaints and providing general information. Inquiries may be submitted by telephone, email and standard mail. The Center will be able to generate information for management to assist in improving areas of service delivery and matching staffing levels with budgets for individual departments and the organization as a whole. A centralized information telephone number has been activated. (755-CITY/755-2489) This telephone number will serve as the main portal for all citizen inquiries, requests for services and other needs.
• Phase One of a new permitting system has been installed. This will allow the City's permit processes to operate more efficiently. It will provide 24/7 on-line access to the permit process and expedite the issuance of permits. Currently citizens can track the progress of a request for a permit through the system. When the entire web-based system is operational, citizens will be able to process building permits, business licenses, and other required documents without coming to City Hall.

Customer Service Standards

• Greet our customers in a friendly, professional and respectful manner.
• Strive to achieve first point of contact resolution for our customers.
• Focus on what our customers can do, explain challenges, and present options.
• Acknowledge customer inquiries within 2 business days.
• Seek continuous feedback from our customers.

Employees are City Ambassadors

• Empower employees with tools and authority to make decisions and make safe exceptions.
• Provide employees with necessary training to increase skills.
• Recognize employees for exceptional customer service delivery.
• Require that employees are treated professionally and respectfully at all times.

This customer service concept, as well as these standards and expectations, will be adopted throughout the organization, ensuring consistency of service delivery and easy accessibility for our citizens.

Economic Growth: Grow Spokane's Economy and Create Jobs

Growing and strengthening Spokane's economy is an important role for the City of Spokane. We want—and need—a healthy economy that creates living-wage jobs for our citizens, that encourages new development and redevelopment, and grows our tax base, enabling us to provide the services citizens demand and expect.

We also want to be "smart" about our growth. Smart growth principles direct development towards existing communities already served by infrastructure and establishes a more cost-effective use of existing resources. We want to continue to be a community of neighborhoods that offers beautiful parks and open spaces, and to provide a range of housing choices, including multi-use neighborhoods such as the proposed Kendall Yards development.

And while we may not yet have the traffic congestion problems that exist elsewhere in the state and nation, we need to better coordinate land use and transportation improvements. Local leaders and other transportation stakeholders are planning transportation options for our citizens for the future to avoid congestion, enhance bicycle and pedestrian alternatives, provide safe routes and efficiently move products to market.

We have a number of initiatives that are helping make the development process more user-friendly. Included in this is a new building permit system that is outlined in our customer service initiative. Along with this is a focused effort to increase predictability of our permit processing time, increasing our levels of service to speed our response and testing new processes such as guaranteed "over the counter" permits. Work Force Development created a new "One Stop" system to better coordinate the job search process for citizens. We also have proposed funding a base-line traffic study that will benefit our neighborhoods as well as bring development projects on line more rapidly.

Our Economic Growth initiatives also focus on accelerating the build out of the University District, directing our incentives and infrastructure to enhance our neighborhood centers, improving the effectiveness of our Community Development spending, and targeting our Workforce Development Program to meet the future needs of our growing economy.

The City has found an innovative way to partner in the update to the downtown plan to keep that area of our community thriving and growing. We support development of downtown housing options through historic preservation and multifamily tax incentives, while targeting Community Development and other funds to ensure that quality housing is provided for all income levels.

We're also working hard to implement our neighborhood development plans, encouraging stakeholder collaboration in land use and zoning updates, creating new historic districts, and coordinating streetscape improvements. We're testing new models with Code Enforcement to enhance the livability of our entire community.

The City of Spokane is open for business. We are embracing smart growth principles to make development decisions predictable, fair and cost effective.

Quality of Life: Enhance the Safety, Health, and Opportunities of our Citizens and Employees

Spokane's beautiful natural environment, our clean air and water, and a healthy and safe citizenry are critically important if we are to sustain Spokane's quality of life for decades to come. We have an enormous opportunity to capitalize on our quality of life assets as a tool for economic development. In fact, we are already doing so every time we describe Spokane as "Near Nature. Near Perfect."

We will strategically manage quality of life assets to capitalize on them for economic development. Our decisions will be aimed at improving the livability of our community so that Spokane's reputation continues to grow nationally and internationally as a desirable place to work, live and play.

The quality of life initiative cuts across nearly all functions of City government, but will initially focus on the following:

Smart Growth. Environmental responsibility is smart business for Spokane. The City is growing, and we should do so by focusing growth in our community around existing infrastructure, a more wise use of dollars as called for in the state's Growth Management Act and the City's own Comprehensive Plan.

Water Stewardship. Continue support for the water stewardship program and the encouragement of water conservation. The City will implement its plan to meet phosphorus TMDL levels in the Spokane River, continue to participate in measures to keep the river clean, and to understand our aquifer.

Air Quality/Energy Efficiency. The Mayor has signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to commit to further reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. The City will also take measures to conduct an audit of the City's energy efficiency, seek LEED certification on new city facilities, and join ICLEI.

Waste Reduction. We will continue to improve the City's recycling facilities, curbside pickup, and to encourage waste reduction, re-use and recycling.

Healthy Lifestyles. We will encourage healthy lifestyle behaviors among employees wherever possible. A plan will be developed by the City's Risk Department for encouraging healthy activities in which employee can participate.

Financial Stability: Secure the City's Financial Stability

Financial stability is of paramount importance to the City because it allows for the successful delivery of services with an eye on the long-term financial ramifications of decisions, particularly given the budget challenges of the past. Prudent financial decisions can help determine future opportunity and should result in citizens receiving the best possible government for their tax dollar. It is the goal of the City to keep finances in long-term balance and not focus financial planning around short-term needs. The City now plans for its financial future by not only looking to the next year but also looking six years into the future. This allows the City to plan and accommodate changes in our financial picture before items reach a crisis point.

A significant challenge for the City is its long-term structural gap in which revenue growth is slower than expense growth, particularly rising health care costs. This "gap" amounts to a typical shortfall of approximately $3 million per year. Therefore, in an effort to look long-term towards a more balanced future, we have focused on establishing an increase in revenue growth rate and a decrease in expense growth rate. Our revenue focus is found mainly in our Economic Growth priority. Our expense focus is directed to our collective labor bargaining strategy and a concerted attempt to control the escalating cost of medical benefits.

In order to secure the City's financial stability we also are:

• Implementing the portions of the Matrix Efficiency and Effectiveness Study that work best for Spokane.
• Creating a more successful, professional approach to labor relations.
• Addressing the runaway cost of our city medical benefits.
• Following strict measures to live within our financial means.
• Investing short-term surpluses in priorities that will enhance our long-term financial health.

Initiatives & Results

Based on the direction developed in this process, we have devised a work plan that currently includes more than 90 initiatives citywide. We have tied each of the initiatives to one or more of our priorities. This is an aggressive work plan, and one that will show significant results quickly. Most of these initiatives are slated to be completed by the end of 2007. The list of initiatives is attached here.

Further details on operational plans and tactics can be found in specific City department strategic plans.

The City of Spokane's Strategic Plan is about focusing our work and charting a course for our organization to become best in class in the nation. We are committed to this plan, and that's good for our entire community.