The Village of Burns Lake’s annual strategic planning process gets under way next month.
Council and senior staff are scheduled to meet May 19-20 to determine the municipality’s proposed goals for 2016. The two-evening, closed-door session is designed to identify a series of objectives that can be incorporated into the village’s annual report.
“Council will gather information from the public, review the 2015 municipal objectives, discuss potential 2016 municipal objectives, consider capacity and budgetary implications of each objective, summarize the discussion points, and finally set the goals,” explained village Chief Administrative Officer Sheryl Worthing last week. “The goals and objectives are then presented to council for review at a future meeting and approved. Once approved, they are incorporated into the annual report and presented to the public.”
This year’s strategic planning process will for the first time incorporate a public engagement component. Starting the first week in May, the municipality will use social media and other tools to gather public input.
In a recent report to council, city clerk Cameron Hart indicated that the municipality will use Facebook and Twitter to engage residents in the planning process.
“A Facebook conversation will be started with a paid advertisement asking for suggestions for municipal priorities, and questions from the public,” Hart reported April 20. “A Twitter conversation will be started using #VBLpriorities and #askVBL, (and) a post will be put on Burnslake.ca asking for feedback to be sent to the village email.”
Hart also plans to create an online survey and place advertisements in local print media.
Council has employed a variety of public engagement techniques in the past as part of its budget preparation process. According to Hart and Worthing, the municipality’s growing presence on social media makes it possible to efficiently gather more immediate public input into municipal planning.
“This provides an excellent opportunity for public engagement and collecting feedback from local residents,” Worthing noted.
Council also hopes to meet with representatives of the Burns Lake & District Chamber of Commerce prior to the May session.
“The chamber of commerce recently completed a strategic planning process with some great results,” Worthing told council in a report May 2. “It will be important for council to have an understanding of some of the initiatives the chamber of commerce will be initiating so as not to overlap projects. It is also important in determining what areas we will be able to work together.”
Every municipality in BC is required under the Local Government Act to prepare an annual report before June 30 of each year. Among other things, these reports must include “a statement of municipal objectives, and the measures that will be used to determine progress respecting those objectives, for the current and next year.”
