2025 Lake Elmo Draft Strategic Plan

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2025 STRATEGIC PLAN 3 4. Maintain responsive, transparent, and adaptive governance. • Proactively address current needs and future challenges while responding to immediate needs. • Foster open communication and active collaboration with stakeholders. • Uphold ethical, transparent, and fair decision-making processes. • Embody principles of servant leadership for the well-being of the community through selfless service and guidance. • Ensure actions are purposefully aligned with long-term community objectives. • Welcome new ideas and collaborative solutions to address evolving opportunities and challenges. 5. Deliver efficient, reliable, and innovative public services. • Foster a safe and secure community by investing in and maintaining engaged police, fire, and public works services. • Maintain a highly trained, responsive staff dedicated to excellence. • Be innovative and adaptable with services to meet the community's changing demands. • Embrace a team approach centered on serving the community effectively. 6. Build and sustain resilient infrastructure to support a thriving and sustainable community. • Implement effective water management strategies to ensure long-term availability of safe drinking water. • Manage Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) to align asset management with fiscal responsibility. • Construct and maintain street and utility systems with care and foresight with appropriate management. • Adopt environmentally responsible practices for infrastructure and resource management. ORGANIZATIONAL EXPECTATIONS AND VALUES The second part of the session focused on how the organization desires to conduct its matters and how the different members of the leadership team interact with each other. Effective local governance requires respect and understanding of the difference in roles between the elected body, the City Council, and its professional staff. The City Council should focus on governance through establishing policy, providing direction, and acting on official matters before the City. Staff, through the City Administrator, focus on execution of services and implementation of Council directives. Understanding those roles and what each body provides for the other is important in setting the context for a strong, working relationship and good governance. For this exercise, the City Council and staff leadership teams respectively split into two groups to discuss two questions: what it expects of the other group and what it provides for the other group. The Council and staff leadership team then reconvened and shared with each other providing an opportunity for discussion and feedback. The outcome of this work are the following expectations and values for the City of Lake Elmo.