Statesboro City Council, Mayor Jonathan McCollar and key city staff members are traveling to Jekyll Island again for their annual strategic planning retreat this Friday and Saturday, exactly a year after the previous one.
This year, the retreat’s location on the island is different, the Jekyll Island Club Resort at 371 Riverview Drive, instead of the Westin Jekyll Island Hotel where it was held last year. But the facilitator engaged to guide the talks is the same, Michael Hourihan with the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia. The hours are also very similar, 9 a.m.–5 p.m. Friday, with a one-hour noon lunch and a 6:30 p.m. group dinner, and then resuming 8:30 a.m. Saturday before adjourning at noon.
No votes will be taken or formal decisions made, the mayor and city manager promise. The strategic planning sessions are open to the public, including any Statesboro people who want to make the two-hour drive.
Soon after Friday’s session starts, the city officials are slated to discuss what they have learned in the last 12 months, “good,” “bad” and “ugly,” identifying what is going well and suggesting how to fix things that aren’t.
Then City Manager Charles Penny will lead a review of the goals set at last year’s retreat. Major projects such as the completed park renovations, the Georgia Initiative for Community Housing, the now published, city-ordered housing study and the evolving Downtown Masterplan and Creek on the Blue Mile project are listed in the outline.
“They tie into the goals, but we’re going to review some of the major accomplishments for the year,” Penny said Wednesday. “Then we want to talk about ‘big ideas,’ ‘big thoughts,’ you know, looking ahead, and not so much just a year ahead. We’ve got to look three to five years out, or even five to 10 years out in some cases, just trying to plan for the future.”
“Big Ideas-Big Thoughts” actually appears on the agenda as the title of the 1 p.m. Friday discussion. Topics listed for brainstorming include “2023 T-SPLOST” — in other words the Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax and the possibility of a referendum next year to extend it — “Branding Statesboro,” “Public facilities downtown,” “Housing opportunity in downtown,” and the catchall, “Other ideas.”
A Statesboro brand?
The “branding” topic has to do with proposed creation of a marketing identity, or brand, for Statesboro itself. Penny said he may make a recommendation, such as of a consulting firm that might handle this, in the next month or two, but this week’s discussion will be limited to the idea of branding and what the process would include.
“When we talk about Statesboro, how would you identify Statesboro?” Penny asked hypothetically. “I’ve heard, since I’ve been here, a number of things. Some people talk about ‘The City That Soars.’ So, what is it that sort of marks our community?”
Mayor Jonathan McCollar, in a separate phone interview, associated the “public facilities” topic with a desire to have some sort of major event venue located downtown. Penny said he is not prepared to pin the topic to an event venue specifically.
“It could also be housing, it could be any number of things, so I’m trying not to get locked into one thing but trying to think outside the box,” he said.
Also Friday, beginning around 2 p.m., Penny is scheduled to present thoughts and priorities for the city budget for fiscal year 2022, which will begin July 1, 2022. However, this is not the work session for the proposed budget and agency requests, which will be held in Statesboro, probably in late April or May, he said.
Later Friday afternoon, the city officials are slated to discuss what would be needed to turn the various big ideas into realities, proposing “action plans” that include what to do, when to do it, who will do it and how to pay for it.
The Saturday session is slated to begin at 8:30 a.m. with a review of the city’s capital improvement budget, which includes projects and long-term purchases funded from the T-SPLOST, the multipurpose SPLOST and the city’s general fund.
Youth services
“Youth initiative” then appears as the topic for 9:30 a.m. Saturday. In McCollar’s Feb. 22 annual State of the City speech, he talked about several of the topics now listed for the strategic planning retreat, but he placed the greatest emphasis on youth services.
“One subject that I will be addressing council on is some of the things that I think will be good measures for us to engage our young people, and I think that’s going to be a really good thing for us,” McCollar said Wednesday. “Since the State of the City, I was actually able to bring a group of young people to City Hall, close to 30 of them, to sit down and really listen to them and what their ideas were.”
That was just last Saturday, March 5, when he met with the group of middle school and high school students in the council chambers. Most were from the Langston Chapel and William James middle schools and Statesboro High, and one young person from Metter also participated, McCollar reported.
“We’ve got some brilliant people that are in that age group, so they came up with some great ideas,” he said. “They were discussing mentorship, they were talking about mental health, financial literacy, and so these were things that the young people themselves were bringing to the table.”
He had also facilitated a conference Feb. 12, also a Saturday, at the same location with adults who work with youth in various programs. The city’s Statesboro Youth Commission helped organize both discussions.