Shaping the future of Chestermere

Chestermere City council set out their strategic plan for the city over the next four years at the Feb. 20 council meeting.
“I’m extremely pleased that we were able to work through and get our new strategic plan in place,” said Chestermere’s Mayor Marshall Chalmers.
The plan, which was developed by council with city administration, is centered around sustainability-based planning.
Described as the, “pillars of community sustainability,’ in the plan, they are: governance, culture, social, economy, and environment.
Within these there are 13 goals for the city supported by 42 strategies to help achieve those goals.
“This council spent numerous hours putting together this plan and its clearly going to provide direction for not only administration but council over the next four years,” said Chalmers.
In addition to their 13 goals, the Strategic Plan also includes nine high priority strategies that council wants to focus on.
“There’s some really nice highlights in there, one is we are cognizant of the fact that we need to address senior housing, transitional housing so we’ve got that in there,”
Some of the priority strategies include, increasing communication between council and residents, reviewing utility rates with an eye to reduce them, increase housing diversity and rebuild trust between city hall and residents.
“We’ve heard loud and clear that the community is looking for us to work with the CUI and the CUI board to try and maintain some reasonableness, if you can put it that way, to the utilities,” he said.
With the creation of the Strategic plan, Chalmers feels that council has brought forward the issues and values expressed to them in their election campaign last year.
“We believe that this strategic plan clearly is tackling those issues,” he said.
The Strategic Plan also sets out updated vision, value, and mission statements for Chestermere.
While council believes that in following this plan they are leading growth in the city in the direction residents want, they also realize that things can change.
To address this both staff and council are aware that the plan must be, “used, reviewed and updated on a regular basis.”
“The nice thing about this is as we move forward we can adjust and modify,” said Chalmers, “that document is meant to do that.”
Read the complete strategic plan online at https://ab-chestermere2.civicplus.com/666/Strategic-Plan.