After their success in finding solutions for several critical and long-standing projects earlier this year, the Board of Selectman (BOS) is now attempting to tackle yet another: the Town’s Strategic Plan. With the sale of Island Avenue School and the approvals of both the school renovation project and the Academy Community Center project, the BOS appears committed to the effort, begun in 2019, to coordinate the town’s long-term departmental strategies.

The strategic plan is the mechanism that provides an opportunity to establish clear policy to guide the preparation of future budgets and work plans. A strategic plan also enables a process for tracking progress and continued growth via a coordinated policy direction, according to members of the BOS.

First Selectwoman Peggy Lyons said a strategic plan is crucial for municipalities in order to navigate forward under a cohesive direction and policy.

“I think the goal, obviously, is to give clear policy directions for the boards and align our capital plan with our operational plan. So, it provides a kind of road map to where we want to get in ten years,” said Lyons. “If we are looking at making investment decisions, or policy changes, or operational decisions, they are all trying to achieve those objectives laid out in the strategic plan.”

According to Lyons, there are five key areas that a strategic plan should focus on, including government, education, community, economic development, and natural resources. These issues interrelate with each other and also are the main drivers of budgets and policy, Lyons said.

“I think they are all equally important because they all rely on each other,” Lyons said. “These are the pillars we identified and, in some ways, they are kind of the generic and what you typically see in a strategic plan, but they are vital and all feed into each other. The government helps lay the foundation to provide services that support education and development. So, the government provides policies and directions for those things. Economic development helps the town thrive and helps property values and brings in tax revenue. Natural resources are why many people want to live in Madison, it’s a quality-of-life issue. We say our crown jewels are beaches and schools, which attract and keep people here in town. So, I think they all feed into one another and I wouldn’t say one is more important than another.”

A framework for Madison’s strategic plan was formulated in 2019 just before the pandemic, and like many aspects of daily life, took a backseat to solving the problems COVID-19 wrought on communities, Lyons said.

“A lot of the groundwork this was done before COVID. Now that we have gotten through COVID and put into place some of the outstanding questions that were there like what to do with Academy [and] what to do with the school renewal plans. Now we have those foundations built and some of those questions answered, and we need to see what has changed in terms of community demands,” Lyons said.

According to Lyons, some of the first steps that the BOS will attempt to get a handle on are building on the outline plan of 2019, but added that the previous work done, pre-pandemic, has provided the Board valuable insight into what priorities the town should focus on.

“I certainly don’t think we want to reinvent the wheel. The idea was that there was a framework established in 2019, but then there wasn’t the strategy and tactics that should follow. So, now we want to step back and find out, what is that strategy and what tactics do we need to move forward and who is going to be involved in that process,” Lyons said. “Now we want to step back and see what are the strategies and tactics we will need.”

Uniting the Strategic Plan with the town’s current efforts developing the Plan of Conservation and Development (POCD) is also an important component of the Board’s work.

“We also are trying to piggyback a little bit on the Plan of Conservation and Development), as that process has started. The POCD really has a lot of components to it that are like a strategic plan. One of the reasons we waited a little bit on rolling out the strategic planning process is so that we could kind of double dip so to speak,” Lyons said. “We don’t want to be hiring consultants that are at cross purposes to each other. We want to be using the information that we get from the POCD process to help us with the Strategic Plan. I feel like we have a lot of information to work off of…we just need some assistance pulling it all together, and that includes hiring a consultant and obtaining feedback from the community.”

Lyons said, that public feedback will also be crucial to any strategic plan implementation and success, and encouraged residents to attend the hybrid meetings on the matter at upcoming town meetings and board meetings.

“It will be great to get community feedback on this plan. We have our annual Town Meeting at the end of January and we are going to be talking about that at that point, with more details” said Lyons. “We really want to get updated public feedback. They did a little bit of that in 2019, but I don’t think they were very well attended at that time. I think that now we will attract more community involvement. We have better ways to reach the community. I think people are really excited about some of the things going on in town right now so, I’m hoping we can get a lot more public input.”

Lyons said both meetings and town surveys will be utilized to obtain the necessary feedback from residents.

Lyons added, “I’m excited about this. I’ve wanted to begin this for a while, but we had so many different moving parts with the POCD coming up…but I think we are on the right path.”