In adopting the Community Sustainability Element as part of its Comprehensive Plan, the City of Edmonds intended to provide a positive conceptual framework for coordinating and assessing the community's progress toward sustainability. For that to happen, there must be a tie between long-range comprehensive planning, mid-range strategic planning, and short-term implementation decisions embodied in budgeting and operations.
In particular, the Community Sustainability Element identifies a number of key principles to apply:
- Engage and educate. Connect with the community and provide ways to access and share information and ideas.
- Integrate. Be holistic in approach, recognizing linkages and seeking to expand problemsolving and solutions beyond traditional or institutional boundaries.
- Innovate. Go beyond conventional approaches; be experimental.
- Be adaptive. Be flexible, discarding or modifying approaches that don’t work and shifting resources where or when needed. Rigid rules will not always work or result in the most effective solution.
- Be strategic. Target and prioritize actions to be effective and gain community support and momentum. Acknowledge limitations, but be creative and persistent in seeking solutions.
- Be a leader. Lead by example, and by forming partnerships that effect decision-making while providing ways to address differing views and perspectives.
- Measure and assess. Set benchmarks to monitor progress and provide feedback to policy development and decision-making.
Clearly, strategic planning plays a critical role in identifying priorities and linking short-term and long-term decision-making. This portion of the City's website is devoted to strategic planning: the process, the goals and priorities, and their implementation.
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