County committee continues with strategic planning process

The county’s strategic planning process inched forward Monday afternoon with the committee members looking at perceived strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing county government.

As with past strategic planning committee meetings, this one was facilitated by Michelle Grimm from the UWExtension. Earlier in the process a survey was sent to county board members asking those members to identify what they saw as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing the county.

At Monday’s meeting, committee members reviewed the compiled list of those comments and then narrowed the comments to the top five in each area. There was then discussion on those areas. From those designated areas, the committee at its next meeting in November, will work on compiling a set of objectives based on addressing those areas identified.

Committee chairman Scott Mildbrand said the plan is to accomplish the strategic planning process with just three more meetings and then formulate a plan to go to the full county board in January.

Mildbrand gave the example of the county doing a poor job with public relations and issuing press releases and said part of the plan could be designating individual people to issue press releases.

Within the strengths, topics identified included solid employees, having a mixed board of experienced and new ideas from more short-term members, and broadband access.

Public relations was the top weakness identified by all committee members.

Committee member Lorie Floyd said this is two different areas, with one being issuing press releases and dealing with The Star News, and the other is communication with employees.

“Communication with employees and department heads is separate from public relations,” she said.

Other weaknesses identified were not taking advantage of the experience of department heads and with the county board training.

Committee member Rod Adams said he didn’t think there was a way to get training for county board. He noted that every situation is something different and that it is something you learn on the fly.

In discussion of the opportunities portion, Grimm and Area Extension Director Art Lersch looked at external opportunities. Floyd said she had not viewed those as being external things, but rather internal to the county. Opportunities identified included public relations and communication, government efficiency and having experienced department heads.

Mildbrand raised concern about how among the things discussed there was nothing addressing taxes or broadband or anything tangible. “I would like to see it addressed sometime in our plan,” he said.

In threats, included were government efficiency and effectiveness, public relations and communications, and the need to mitigate the risk of lawsuits.

At the same time the board’s committee is going through the planning process, the department heads are doing the same process and committee members received their version of the SWOT analysis. This will be combined with the work done by the committee in the goal setting phase.

It was noted that in many areas there was overlap between the department heads and board committees, but in others areas there was no overlap.