Lewis County Crafts Five-Year Strategic Plan With Help From Public

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Lewis County commissioners will adopt a final draft of their five-year strategic plan in the next few weeks after receiving significant input from residents — over 400 resident surveys were turned in and almost 300 residents participated in stakeholder meetings to craft the plan. 

The citizen-led Strategic Planning Advisory Committee (SPAC) and Utah-based firm Tanner LLC worked to craft the plan instead of county leaders — a strategy that commissioners hoped would increase participation.

“People really, really appreciated and enjoyed the opportunity to give input,” SPAC member Peggy Hammer told commissioners Wednesday. “So I would hope that we would, the commissioners would, remember this process for the future.”

Commissioners noted that strategic plans often get put on a shelf to collect dust, especially when they’re created through a top-down approach.

“We wanted the community to take ownership of this, and that’s exactly what they did,” Commissioner Bobby Jackson said.

Dr. Lindsey Pollock and Sean Swope, both challenging sitting commissioners in the upcoming election, have criticized the county for only looking five years out. In an interview with The Chronicle, Pollock said the county missed the opportunity in working with Tanner LLC to develop a 10-year strategic plan. 

But commissioners argue that, after a few years without any strategic plan, immediate needs had to be addressed first. Joe Clark, who served on SPAC, agreed that the county should start looking further down the road, but that first, “we needed to kind of right the ship a little bit.”

The draft of the strategic plan, a short, 17-page document, describes the county as being “at a crossroads ripe with opportunity,” and establishes the county’s primary directive to “build upon our location, resiliency, and strong sense of community to offer future generations the opportunity to build a life for themselves in this beautiful environment that we are fortunate to call home.”

However, it also describes a grim financial state, pointing to unfunded state mandates, infrastructure regulations, and “core services” that have placed a burden on the county. 



“To put it boldly, the current financial trajectory of the County is not sustainable,” it reads. 

One of the five strategic directives outlined in the plan, fiscal sustainability and organizational efficiency, identifies a strategy to address the issue, which would include recruiting more businesses to move to the area, thus raking in more commercial property tax. It’s a goal county commissioners and their challengers have discussed, noting that tech jobs from Seattle and Portland could be brought to the area, which currently has little representation in those fields.

The other four strategic directives include economic development, housing and proactive growth, public health and social services, and public safety. Each directive includes metrics for success, which Commissioner Edna Fund hopes will hold commissioners accountable in their implementation of the plan. 

The drafted plan presented Wednesday encourages county commissioners to create a “community scorecard” for citizens to keep track of how the county is doing. 

Directives and metrics identified in the document largely mirror what commissioners have identified as their priorities in running the county. For example, economic development includes goals to increase internet access and complete flood mitigation projects. 

The plan also identifies a lack of housing, “with vacancy rates currently less than 1 percent” as the biggest factor limiting county-wide growth, and sets out a plan to expedite housing projects by reducing “unnecessary hurdles” to development. 

Tanner LLC will likely stay with the county for a few more meetings, according to County Manager Erik Martin, in order to give guidance regarding implementation of the plan. The plan also includes semi-annual follow-ups with SPAC.

Final adoption of the strategic plan will likely occur in early November.