March 28, 2024

City continuing work on effective, efficient governance

The city’s progress in the area of having an effective, efficient, democratic governance was presented to the city council for the second time as a part of the regular update on the 2015-2017 strategic action plan.

The governance ideal is one of four essential purposes the city identified as a part of the action plan that serves as a detailed guide of what the city staff is working on to further the city’s goals.

“We’re currently in the midst of our 2015-2017 action plan, so we like to give regular reports to city council and to the public to let them know some of the accomplishments we are making toward those goals,” city senior management analyst Natalie Umsted said.

As defined, the city’s purpose of having an effective, efficient, democratic governance is to protect and prudently manage the city’s resources to enhance transparency, accountability, integrity, efficiency, effectiveness and innovations of all operation to provide responsive customer service to support database decision making with timely short term and long range analysis and to attract, motivate and develop a high quality workforce dedicated to collaborative decision making.

Within the overall purpose, the city has three goals to focus work. First, to be good stewards of financial resources and assets is to be accomplished through providing financial projections, policy updates and asset management.

“A few to highlight that we have accomplished since the last report as a city staff include an updated employee handbook and we’ve installed a new camera system to allow for a clearer broadcasting and streaming of our council meeting,” Umsted said. “We’ve worked with Happy Medium marketing firm to evaluate the city’s website and are currently planning next steps on how to move forward in implementing those services.”

City staff has also taken part in multiple leadership training seasons and completed work on the 2016 community attitude survey. Also, the city implemented an online payment ability for the bill pay of ambulance services.

The third round of updates on the four essential purposes begins with the safe community purpose and is followed by economic development and high quality of life in the coming months.

Contact Jamee A. Pierson at 641-792-3121 ext. 6534 or jpierson@newtondailynews.com