North Cook News

The village of Roselle discussed the progress of their developing strategic plan. At their April 24th village board meetings, officials from Roselle asked their village staff to provide them with a status update on how their strategic plan is progressing.

The strategic plan was implemented in 2022 to guide the community through the year 2025 and lead them towards their future goals and projects. As part of that plan, the village board asked for regular updates on how they were achieving some of their goals and also to continually communicate with the public on what steps they were taking and how they have impacted the community thus far. 

"Really going back to October was the first kind of staff report on the progress of the strategic plan" Assistant Village Administrator Brian Joanis said. "And at that time, we had not launched the community dashboard. So, I wanted to highlight that kind of first. There's a link included in my memo that kind of showcases just the transparency efforts surrounding the progress of our plan and where we're at today. But since October, we've made pretty good at least progress on 15 of the 18 initiatives that are going to take us towards achieving the goals that the board outlined, you know, a year and a half ago."

Joanis presented the progress to the board, highlighting first the link to the public dashboard. This was part of their transparency and communication efforts and shows each of the five main areas with a progress bar so that residents can see how the village is doing with their goals. The interactive webpage goes into detail with their efforts on each of the smaller goals within the focus areas.

Joanis shared a brief overview of the five goal areas. For financial Stewardship, they felt good as the village had just received two large grants for projects they were undertaking. This was also a green light for some of their major infrastructure goals. They were yet to start on one of their three main financial goals as they were allowing some new staff who would be leading it time to adjust before starting work on the community education aspect of finance this summer.

This also relates to some of their customer experience focus goals, improving their online resources and communication tools to make finding permits, records, and contact numbers easier for residents. For their operational sustainability they are conducting a review of their staffing levels, job descriptions, compensation and benefits, and how it all compares to similar municipalities. They will present this before the next budget meeting to get ahead of any improvements or changes they could make.