Elburn looks to the future with strategic planning workshops

As Elburn continues to grow, the Village Board is sharing ideas of how to best move forward to meet the future needs of the community.

Most recently, the board had a Strategic Plan Workshop, following up on a similar session that it held several years ago.

“Four years ago, we did the strategic planning session and had the Village Board and the department heads get together and come up with what are the important things they are facing in the village and what things do we need to focus on prior to that,” Village Administrator John Nevenhoven said. “We also did some focus groups and other different entities around town, other governments, nonprofits and residents. They were asked pretty much the same questions and they came up with a lot of ideas and we did this again this time.”

Results of the Dec. 4 workshop will be available in early 2022 and should be presented no later than February.

“There were a bunch of ideas that were thrown around and the group from the Center of Governmental Studies took all these ideas and kind of condensed them into a couple sets,” Nevenhoven said. “So the next step is they’re going to refine the list and send it out to the Village Board and then they’re going to basically rank them in priority of what the individual trustees think should be our priorities in the four areas.”

Goals are being divided into four groups – short-term routine and short-term complex, which have zero to three years completion timelines; and long-term routine and long-term complex, which have a timeline of completion of three to seven years.

As an example, one of the short-term complex goals of the strategic plan from 2018 was to explore multiple communication platforms. The village remains committed to that goal as it implemented the CodeRed community notification system and installed a new Village Hall sign.

An Emergency Operation Plan was another task of the original strategic plan that was approved while implementation remains ongoing.

“What happens if we get hit with that tornado like what happened in Woodridge or in Kentucky?” Nevenhoven asked. “How do we respond? Do our codes need to be updated to make sure that they still reflect the reality of the way the world is now as when the codes were written 25, 30 years ago?”

The brainstorming workshop allowed participants to share ideas and concerns and to get the latest process moving forward.

“It’s taking a lot of ideas and trying to distill those down into workable, manageable ideas that we can take action on,” Nevenhoven said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that something is going to be done. This is a huge undertaking and to try to put it into context of how, why, where and when – at this point, it’s all ideas.”