Photo: Archuleta Board of County Commissioners meeting, December 2023.
“Strategic Planning for Archuleta County is going to be a game changer,” said BOCC Chair Veronica Medina. “I am excited to get this process started…”
— from the Pagosa Daily Post, April 25, 2024.
At some point, I’d like to share a few thoughts about a strategic plan created by the San Juan Water Conservancy District (SJWCD) starting in 2019.
Often, a government district will spend a sizable chunk of their tax revenues hiring consultants to write or update their ‘strategic plan’, which then gets adopted by the district board, and subsequently sits on a shelf where it gathers dust and has practically zero influence on future board decisions.
SJWCD took a different approach in 2019.
But before we look into that different approach, I’d like to consider another strategic plan currently under construction.
Earlier this year, the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners selected a remote company called Civic* Possible to develop a thorough understanding of our community and write up a plan from improving the operations of the Archuleta County government. The obvious assumption is that an improved County government will result in a better life for residents and visitors.
In order to improve our County government, and thus our entire community, Civic* Possible will presumably utilize their previous experience helping other communities improve themselves, and apply that experience to our own situation.
(By the way, the asterisk after “Civic*” is part of the company’s name. It isn’t meant to link to a footnote the way an asterisk normally does. Perhaps this is an indication that Civic* Possible intends to work in unexpected ways?)
Unfortunately, when I do an online search for previous strategic plans that Civic* Possible has helped communities create, I cannot find any. Their website suggests a couple of community projects in Grants Pass, Oregon (a community currently in the news after the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the city’s legal right to lock up homeless people) and in Marquette, Michigan.
But no specific mention of previous “strategic plans” they’d facilitated?
From their website (which I found to have obvious glitches, when viewed on my Firefox browser):
Why is making a change so difficult?
Firstly, if this were easy to answer, there would be far less problems in the world. You’re not alone in wondering about this.
But in short: Change is difficult because the human experience makes each of us unique. Our bureaucratic systems and even our language make it incredibly difficult to identify a shared goal, let alone how to get there.
Also, capitalism.
Also, inertia.
I’m a bit unclear as to why the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners selected this particular team. I didn’t know our commissioners had an issue with capitalism.
I was even less clear, after participating in the May 28 “listening session” hosted by company principal Jason Schneider. (On his website, he refers to himself as a “principle”.)
Civic* Possible had been in town, in person, on May 15, and had conducted a significant number of face-to-face interviews with people recommended by the BOCC. I did not attend the May 15 listening sessions.
The May 28 listening session was open to the general public, but only five citizens logged in to share their thoughts about Archuleta County’s current conditions and possible future. Mr. Schneider had created a rather elementary series of online question to which we could respond anonymously, with “Mostly agree” or “Mostly disagree” type responses.
Although five citizens had logged into the session, most of the questions elicited only two or three responses. (Speaking for myself, I responded to nearly all the questions. Not sure why other participants were reluctant to express their opinions? I love expressing my opinions…)
What use Mr. Schneider will make of input, from three people, to vaguely worded questions, when writing a plan for a community of 14,000 residents, I cannot say.
I can say, however, that I found the online session to be poorly designed and generally unsatisfying. Partly, that’s the nature of ‘Zoom’ type meetings: unsatisfying, when considering big issues like community development.
Here’s the real problem, however.
Change is difficult because the human experience makes each of us unique…
But generally speaking, we don’t want things to change. At least, not drastically.
Sure, we’d like to fix the obvious problems. The potholes, for instance. The workforce shortage. The drug overdoses. The lack of affordable housing. The domestic violence. The food insecurity. The students graduating from high school without the ability to read and understand a news article.
But who actually knows how to fix these things? And how many of these things can government address successfully?
If government can address these problems, why has it failed, so far, to do so?
Inertia? Capitalism?
Lack of a strategic plan?
I quoted BOCC chair Veronica Medina at the beginning of this installment.
“Strategic Planning for Archuleta County is going to be a game changer… I am excited to get this process started…”
Are we even clear about what a “strategic plan” is, when it comes to a supposedly democratic government?
It’s my understanding that the original idea of “strategic planning” comes from military operations, and revolves around defeating an enemy — but with the understanding that the plan will likely become useless — as a ‘plan’ —once the enemy is engaged.
A quote from President (and General) Dwight Eisenhower in The New York Times, 1957:
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything…” In an emergency, the first thing to do is “to take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window…”
“But if you haven’t been planning you can’t start to work, intelligently at least,” he said…
This quote suggests an interesting idea.
If the plan is worthless, but planning is everything…
…that is to say, if what is crucially important is not the finished plan, but the process of writing the plan…
…why would you hire strangers from Oregon or Michigan to write your plan?