City Council approves strategic goals

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

By the year 2030, the City of Mesquite will be “Nevada’s most dynamic, diversified and neighborly community.” At least it will if the Mesquite City Council gets its way. This was the stated vision of the Council after a Strategic Planning workshop held last month. A one-page summary of that workshop was presented to the City Council for approval on Tuesday, Feb. 25.

The summary set forth three Strategic Pillars, or priority areas of focus, for the city in achieving its 2030 vision.

The first of these was to “increase housing inventory to meet the needs of an expanding workforce.” Councilman George Rapson pointed out that workforce housing was a high priority, but the need actually expanded to all entry-level housing.

“The fact is that we don’t have enough apartments in this town,” Rapson said. “So we really want to expand the scope of this to include entry level housing.”

The second strategic pillar was to expand recreational and sports tourism offerings to grow and diversify the economy. Council members had noted that visitor volumes had been trending downward as the city economy had increasingly depended upon gambling and golf to sustain those numbers.

“Whatever we are doing is not working,” Rapson said. “As a city we need to do something to keep us going. Diversifying into recreational tourism and sports is virtually recession proof. Golf and gaming are not. These people will have their kids in these sports programs. It will diversify our tourism base into areas that are more consistent.”

The third pillar identified was to invigorate development of the downtown area of Mesquite. Rapson explained that this entailed looking at incentives and programs that would encourage businesses and development to come to the downtown area.

“If businesses come and make a substantial investment downtown, what can the city do to make an investment there as well?” Rapson asked. “What synergy can we create to encourage others to come downtown.”

The fourth pillar was to create new, and enrich existing, pipelines to create a prepared workforce. Councilwoman Annie Black pointed out that much of the discussion surrounding this topic had focused on improving education.

“I’d envision a good part of workforce development being focused more on education,” Black said. “I think that workforce development is a byproduct of education. So we need to work to fix our schools as much as we can in our roles. That is important if we are trying to diversify our demographic.”

Councilwoman Sandra Ramaker pointed out in the meeting that these were just general focus points being given as directions to City staff to work on and develop a plan to address.

“The council wasn’t challenged with dictating the details of how to get these done, but rather to envision what needs to be done,” Ramaker said. “We gave the task to (City Manager) Aaron Baker to come up with a solution and a plan to address these.”

“But this is not just lip service,” Ramaker added. “We have all come together and agreed that we really want to see these things done. So we will see steps happening soon.”

Baker said that he and the staff are already working on these items. He expected to bring back a report on plans to address the workforce housing item in the next City Council meeting. Then the Recreational and Sports Tourism idea would be addressed in a report in the meeting following that, he said. Other reports would follow.

“We may not have everything worked out in details,” Baker said. “But (these initial reports) will cover the scope of what we are working on and show that these are the areas to focus on as well. That way we make sure that we are on the same page with the expectations of what success will look like on each one.”
Baker said that he was pleased with the feedback and direction from the council.

“I feel like in my 14 years working at Mesquite, staff has never had this level of direction and clarity from the council on what we should be working on,” Baker said.

Rapson made a motion to adopt the one-page summary of the Strategic Planning Session. The motion was approved unanimously by the council.