Council’s open strategy talk most informative

Coun. Pat Wallace may have put it best during today’s City council discussion on its strategic plan (yes, the one council labored over in secret one recent weekend). 

“This is going to read like a book before we’re done,” she said, after listening to several of her fellow councillors attempting vainly to re-invent the wheel, and a lot of other things, in discussing the nuances of council’s intention “to diversify and strengthen our economy.”

The purpose of the session was to fine tune what council came up with during the closed-door sessions, and one is tempted to ask, given the verbal meandering today, just how much productivity actually came out of the secret confab.

One is tempted but I’m not going to go there. In fact, I enjoyed sitting in on the discussion and listening to all the back and forth and pondering of this and that. The thought process that goes into writing the strategic plan is as important as the final document.

Sure, the newbies struggled with the difference between broad objectives and specific actions, and they sometimes went over old ground that was plowed long ago, but so what? This is the stuff we need to hear, and nobody is going to think the worse of those sitting around the table and tossing out ideas.

It was a free-ranging brain storm and it’s the way a group of right-thinking people go about putting things down on paper and weeding out the unnecessary stuff. It’s an editing process that anyone who does much writing is familiar with. You put it all down, then rewrite it until you get what you want.

It’ll look like a book at first, but that’s just part of the process. The new members of council were doing a great job and challenging and asking questions, and the veterans were doing their part by providing background.

Why any of them should have been afraid to do it all in the open from the beginning I’ll never understand.