- Over the weekend, the City of Wasco staff and City Council members gathered for a planning workshop to identify what the city needs to work on during the next fiscal year, which starts in July.
- The top five items that were recognized as priorities are city infrastructure, public safety, community services center and city facilities, economic development and community communications, in order.
- While those are the main priorities, there are plenty of other areas of interest like green space beautification, parks rehab, community and local business gathering spaces, pedestrian street safety, and homelessness.
- 23ABC Spoke with Scott Hurlbert, Wasco City Manager, who noted they are still in the process of working on the plan for the next year and if residents would like to give input, to reach out to the City Council member that covers their district.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
If you're like me, which is a scary thought to think about, you probably saw Saturday's Strategic Planning Workshop on the City Council agenda and wondered what is that?
I spoke with city manager Scott Hurlbert, who said that that's basically a workshop where city staff and city council can come together and start planning out objectives that they want to start working on in the next fiscal year. Now in talking with Hurlbert, he said the list that they were able to come up with up to this point were:
- City infrastructure, like streets and utilities
- Public safety as it relates to the police department and code compliance
- Community service centers and city facilities
- Economic developments
- And a relatively newer priority over the last couple of years, community communication and ensuring that Wasco residents stay in the know
"You need a suite of techniques to get messages out to the entire community.. This is a category that it's not a new effort but it's identified on our priority list," said Hurlbert.
So those are the top five things, and according to Hurlbert, many of them are continuous works in progress but if you were counting that list is only five things long, and those are the priories but other areas of interest include things like green space beautification, parks rehab, community and local business gathering spaces, Pedestrian street safety, and homelessness
And if you're worried that you're too late to give your input, the fiscal year doesn't start until July and the city will be ironing out these details in the meantime. If you have something you'd like to see done throughout the city of Wasco, Hurlbert said the best course of action is to reach out to your City Council Member.
"Every citizen's input is important and it helps to not only make us aware but it adds their voice to the weight of that issue, so we know if 20 people come in and 19 say the same thing, we probably need to focus on that," said Hurlbert.
Now if you are a Wasco resident and you don’t know who your city council member is, you can find that information on our website.
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