Happy New Year, Flower Mound! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season with your family and friends.
This month, I’m going to take the time to look forward at 2024 – and beyond – and to talk to you about Town Council’s Strategic Plan. Each year, Town Council develops a Strategic Plan to guide our priorities, processes, and decision-making over the next several years. You can read the full document online at flower-mound.com/towncouncil, but I’d like to quickly run through our nine objectives and some of the initiatives we hope to implement to help us reach our goals.
Objective One: Protect and Expand the Town’s Tree Canopy. There are a couple of ways we’d like to accomplish this, starting with projects in 2024 to better promote environmental education programs and tree planting events, evaluate public areas for tree plantings, and increase awareness of the Town’s tree species selection list.
Objective Two: Increase Open Space, Parkland, and Recreational Opportunities. In the next couple of years, we hope to do this by identifying and assessing potential land acquisition opportunities to maintain the current number of Town park acres per 1,000 people. Staff is also working on planning and presenting options for a Town signature festival that would ideally happen in fall 2025. And, finally, we have a goal of incentivizing open space dedication to increase the amount of preserved open space, as well as privately maintained-publicly accessible open space.
Objective Three: Adopt a Comprehensive and Strategic Economic Development Plan. The plan would outline the Town’s future economic goals and objectives, and in the process of creating the plan, staff will also analyze our sales tax by industry so that Council can look at ways to increase the amount of sales tax that the Town collects.
Objective Four: Implement Innovative Traffic Solutions. We’ll do this through prioritizing intersection improvements in our Capital Improvement Plan, collaborating with TxDOT on traffic solutions on the west side of Flower Mound, and researching alternative funding for transportation projects.
Objective Five: Adopt a Future Facilities Strategy. We’ll first complete a needs assessment based on Town build-out and a Town Hall Office Space Plan, and we’ll create an internal land acquisition committee that analyzes parkland acquisition and future facility needs against current land opportunities and current infill properties.
Objective Six: Adopt a Long-Range Financial Strategy. Some initiatives we want to accomplish under this objective include increasing the homestead exemption to 20% by Fiscal Year 2028-29, better educating Town Council and the public on municipal finance and how municipal debt works, and utilizing debt to fund capital projects that maintain current levels of service.
Objective Seven: Recruit and Retain High-Quality Staff. To do this, we want to bring forward a mid-year market adjustment and hire a senior human resources generalist to perform annual compensation and classification analyses.
Objective Eight: Maintain Operational Continuity and Resiliency. This objective calls for performing upgrades to ensure critical infrastructure security, conducting a Town-wide cybersecurity risk assessment, and conducting annual risk assessments and response plans.
Last, but not least, Objective Nine: Promote Transparency and Public Engagement. To continue improving upon this goal, we’ll create a monthly webpage update schedule to ensure review of every webpage on the Town’s website at least once a year, and we’ll continue to expand FloMo Convos by performing additional sessions this year.
Our Town is such a wonderful place to live, and this Strategic Plan will help ensure that the Town continues to provide effective, efficient, and innovative services to our community. Be sure to check out the full plan at the link provided for more information on these objectives and how we plan to accomplish them. I’ll be sure to provide updates as 2024 progresses. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you back here in February!
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