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02/27/2008: "Council Makes A “Refined List” Of Priorities For SJC"

(Only two members of the public showed up for the workshop)

Retreats and work sessions are designed to allow a free flow of ideas and solutions to the how San Juan County should be governed, and the Council decided last year to hold a retreat to look forward, twenty or more years, as they prioritized a long list of things they had identified as important

Last year the Council decided that a list of initiatives and prioritized set of goals would, among other things, help the Council get some things done.
Exactly one year after the 2007 Retreat, the Council and County Administrator Pete Rose, held their 2008 workshop, and come up with a list of priorities, called a “refined List” of Core Initiatives.

To get there, the council spent most of the day making a list under key categories, then “voted” on them by each member ranking them one to ten. That process generated a “Refined List”, which was in turn ranked and prioritized.

The refined list -in order of rankings, a sort of “Top Ten Reasons” of what the County needs to do, and when- may surprise the public.


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(Council members vote on the master list to reduce it down to a "refined List"

Each Council member could vote once for any item on a master list (we will try to put that together for a later story), but was limited to a total of ten votes they could cast.
All seven voted for “Interisland connectivity” of the islands so that the public on an island could watch on a monitor meetings held on any of the other islands.

There were six votes to “Evaluate build-out, & determine the absolute carrying capacity” of the islands.

*There were five votes for the following::

Complete a “five year budget and staffing forecast”; “Training for committees”, so they understood the process and procedures that govern them; and “evaluate capital budget needs”
* There were four votes for water related issues, such as a “study of de-sal, catchment, graywater and possible impact”; which related to the four votes to “Look at maximum size/scale of housing, with incentives and disincentives, and the “footprint of accessory structures.”

* There were only three votes to “Look at effect of focus on environment vs. affordability & determine consequences.”

* The rest of the list only received two votes, to include such things as a:
-“Cap on housing size”;
- Evaluate what other communities are doing, look for lessons & success at controlling growth-land use”;
-Use computer visualization to show effect of various land use decisions”; -“Continued enthusiastic support to community land trusts”;
- “Survey what other communities have done with affordable housing, plus with what success”; :
-Maybe we need to look at ‘benefits’ to Nantuckent-ization, Aspin-ization if in fact we cannot do anything about it”; and
- “Improve communication with public thru: web based surveys; instant surveys; community forums, and more posting on web site”.

Near the end of the process, Councilman Rich Peterson pointed out that the one thing all of them had agreed on, and had spent an hour discussing, was ferry related issues, but it had not shown up on the list.

It was decided that, unlike some of the other items on the list, the Council was already committed to doing what they could when it came to ferry issues.

After the 2007 retreat, it was decided that “A set of core work initiatives and a comprehensive, prioritized set of goals send a strong message of leadership to the community and County organization, it represents long-range strategic thinking, and it increases the chances of the desired outcomes getting done,” was just what was needed.

But one question that kept coming up at the 2008 retreat was the question of the budget. Where will the money come from to accomplish the goals of the list? No one had an idea for that one, so there were no votes on how to fund the list.