Strategic plan needs more than a rush job
A strategic plan is an organization's process of defining its strategy or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to attain strategic goals. It demands its leaders define their vision for the future. It is a process of looking forward, looking to align the long-term and short-term goals with the mission of a community or business as well as allowing for regular evaluation and revision.
To be done right, it takes careful and serious time, thought and involvement by all of the participants.
We enunciate these points because Bloomfield Township began a five-year strategic plan process this spring, one that is necessary and long-overdue, but which is being pushed for completion by this October.
By comparison, the city of Birmingham recently underwent a master plan process which took well over two years, involved numerous meetings by the city's planning board before review by the city commission, involved a number of community charettes and other meetings. Birmingham has been clear their master plan is their planning document for the city going forward.
While the difference between a strategic plan and a master plan is that a strategic plan asks, “Where do you want to go,” and a master plan answers, “Here is the road map on how to get there,” they should both be considered vital community organizational directives for planning. To take just four to six months in preparing and instituting such a document is both an insult to the community and its leaders, and just plain irresponsible on the part of those leaders, notably Bloomfield Township Supervisor Dani Walsh, whose initiative this has been.
Walsh first spoke about the need for a new master plan when she ran for supervisor in 2020. In her candidate questionnaire for Downtown, she wrote, “Unfortunately, there is no current master plan for our community. It expired about six years ago… As a business consultant who focuses on long-term sustainability, it is frustrating that my requests for an updated master plan falls on the deaf ears of the majority voting bloc. A master plan is an asset that protects against short-sighted decisions… As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.’ As supervisor, I will create a committee of citizens, community leaders, and employees to update our master plan.”
Yet in the almost four years she has been supervisor, it was not until three-and-a-half years into her term, verging on her re-election, that a strategic plan was introduced, with public community forums only in late June, announced on the township website, when many residents are traveling or otherwise engaged. Consultants BerryDunn reported at a recent township board of trustees meeting that the website had 2,000 visits, over 1,400 unique users, 92 hard comments, and 572 survey responses, and 100 people attended the three community forums in total.
Yet Bloomfield Township has a population of over 44,000 residents, so that is a feeble community response.
Many board members speaking at a recent township board meeting were frustrated with the efforts to rush the process through – both before November's general election, and seemingly with such little community awareness and participation.
We absolutely concur.
Recalibrate and reassess. Take the time to do a strategic plan the right way, rather than just rush and get one done. It is a costly and time-consuming effort which must reflect the numerous demographics, whether by ethnicity, age groups, economics, residential versus business, or any and all others which now apply to the diverse communities which call the township home.
We applaud the effort to create a strategic plan for Bloomfield Township, where residents often speak up at board meetings requesting things that are different than when the previous plan was implemented in 1980. It is important to adapt and improve for the decades ahead.
We would hate to think this rush job on planning for the future is a way to pander to voters on the eve of an election, as some have suggested, which would be a disservice to everyone, with long-lasting consequences.
