LAKEPORT–Top ranking goals for the City of Lakeport were revealed to the public at a special meeting at City Hall Tuesday. The results are from a goal-setting workshop held last week in which only five community members showed up. They, along with city staff and elected officials brainstormed about goal ideas and voted for those they thought were most important.
The city held a “yellow sticky note” exercise in the beginning of Oct. to come up with a list of goals. Those goals were then posted on the walls at the second city hall workshop, the community was invited to add goals to the lists. About 30 people were expected to show up, and with only five in attendance, community members were more than three times outnumbered by city council members and staff. Of those community members who participated, several complained that when it came time to vote for the goals at the end of the workshop, many of their goals didn”t make it on the final list.
“It seemed like they just wrote what they wanted to see up there, and then everyone voted,” Suzanne Lyons, a resident of Lakeport said at the meeting Tuesday. She was a participant in the goal-setting workshop last week and did not think the methods were fair. In response, City Manager Jerry Gillham said, “We never said it was going to be a democratic process.”
The methodology for ranking the goals went like this: The city had previously established their “top seven” favorite goals, those were then ranked as each group of people (including citizens and staff) moved from table to table. Each group was allowed to add three new goals to each list. After this process they were ranked again. Then city staff members took large sheets of paper and hand-wrote new lists of goals for each of the five sections. The new lists ranged from 13 to 21 goals each. Some people complained that some of their added goals were not kept on the new lists. The lists were then posted on the wall and every person was given sheets of stickers to place their votes.
There were four colors for voters to indicate the importance of each goal: red for the strongest, orange for fairly strong, yellow for medium, and green for low.
Each person had seven stickers of each color (28 stickers total) to vote with on each of the five sections. The total number of votes were then tallied at a later date and revealed at the city council meeting Tuesday.
Gillham says they have not settled on which goals will “win.”
He said that even though particular goals received many votes, they might not be implemented. For the purposes of space, the Record-Bee is showing below the top five goals of each section according to total number of votes.
The city will hold special meetings in the future to determine which goals they will pursue and how to implement them. The goals fell into five categories: economic prosperity, special projects, infrastructure, livability and effective governance.
Contact Elizabeth Wilson at ewilson@record-bee.com. To comment on this story or others, please visit www.record-bee.com.
