Duane Hicks
Fort Frances council and administration gathered at Sunny Cove Camp yesterday for an all-day session to map out a strategic plan for the rest of council’s term.
From 9 a.m. to nearly 7 p.m., they spent the day analyzing the town’s current vision and mission statements, as well as identifying corporate values, current challenges and opportunities, goals, strategies to implement those goals and, finally, an action plan for the implementation of strategies.
“We identified areas council intends to discuss, put them in a plan, and kind of prioritized the plan—what should be done and what shouldn’t be done,” Mayor Roy Avis explained this morning.
“Plus, this year we asked for input from individuals and groups, and we received that, and that’s all been moved into our strategic plan,” he added.
A sampling of the areas to be covered in the strategic plan include commercial revitalization and the downtown core area (including the fate of the old Rainy Lake Hotel), seniors’ issues and assisted living, mill property re-assessment and the potential impact on the community, and transportation infrastructure (including the Active Transportation Plan).
Other areas on the long list include a “Go Local” retail loyalty program, partnerships with First Nations and the private sector (especially the emerging mining industry), housing and property availability, and water meters.
“The discussion on water meters has been left in the plan,” said Mayor Avis.
“We didn’t make a total decision on where we were going to go, but it’s identified that it’s something we have to do something about,” he remarked.
Fort Frances CAO Mark McCaig said this morning that administration now will compile all of the information from yesterday’s planning session, present it to council in draft form (possibly as early at its June 27 meeting), take it back to the management group and assign responsibilities for tasks, and then assign completion dates for tasks to monitor progress.
The final version then will be brought back to council to be officially accepted, when it will be available to the public.
The whole process should take about a month or so, noted McCaig.
“It will be become a document that the administration lives by, and council lives by, over the next three-and-a-half years,” pledged Mayor Avis.
From an administrative point of view, McCaig said the strategic planning “went really well.”
“It’s a very ambitious exercise to complete a corporate strat plan like we did yesterday . . . to do that in one day is gruelling,” he admitted.
“But I feel we put the nuts and bolts of it together quite nicely.
“I was happy. We accomplished exactly what we set out to do yesterday,” McCaig stressed.
McCaig noted the strategic plan for the 2006-10 term of council had “a high completion rate,” and every objective in it was done.
Or, in the case of some ongoing issues, they were move forwarded into this new strategic plan.
“I feel pretty good about the success of the last document, and that was used as a jumping on point for this new one,” McCaig said.
