The Des Moines City Council’s Study Session on Thursday, March 6, 2025, tackled several key issues, ranging from citizen engagement to long-term strategic planning and committee restructuring.
Public comments highlighted concerns about the effectiveness of current advisory committees.
Central to the session was the development of a new Strategic Plan, with the council exploring various approaches, including hiring a facilitator and utilizing AI tools.
Additionally, the council addressed the need to streamline its committee structure to improve efficiency and reduce redundancy, ultimately voting to trial a “Committee of the Whole” format.
The session also examined the future of appointive committees, with a proposed consolidation aimed at enhancing their impact and reducing administrative burden.
Public Comments
One commenter said that, as a member of the Citizens Advisory Committee, the group has been underutilized. She believes it is using valuable staff time and city resources to accomplish minor tasks. She wondered how the new Planning Commission will be different.
Strategic Plan Development
City Manager Katherine Caffrey explained that an organization’s Strategic Plan is the central plan which guides all its other plans. It is the long term vision that outlines the city’s goals and priorities. Often, the goals are measurable and the plan becomes part of the budget process. A Comprehensive Plan, in contrast, focuses on land use.
City Manager Caffrey presented a few different styles and examples of Strategic Plans from nearby cities, in order to gauge which type the council would prefer to develop. She said that down the road, there could be a live dashboard for the public, outlying the progress updates on specific aspects of the plan.
Having an outside group come in to assist in the development of a Strategic Plan will cost between $15,000 and $50,000. Caffrey shared that she thought this would be the best use of some economic development funds she has in the City Manager budget. They could also perform outreach to gather community input.
Councilmember JC Harris said that this would be the perfect use of Chat GPT. He thought that all transcripts of council meetings over the years could simply be dumped into it. AI could then be asked to spit out a draft Strategic Plan, which would be honed by the council. This idea did not receive support. Harris also said that the city has paid for three communication studies in the last few years, and the net gain from that has been zero.
Deputy Mayor Harry Steinmetz argued that the Strategic Plan needs to be forward looking, rather than delving into past meetings for its priorities. Councilmember Yoshiko Grace Matsui brought up the importance of including input from folks in every one of the different neighborhoods in Des Moines, which will all have issues and desires specific to their regions.
City Manager Caffrey will come back to a future meeting with some financial forecasting, which will be a basis for Strategic Plan development. She will also look for a group to lead this development that has experience working with smaller cities that face similar issues.
Committee Reorganizations
The city currently has six different council committees. It has seven appointive committees of volunteers, plus two more (Airport Committee & Planning Commission) coming soon. All of these require a lot of staff work and support. In addition, it was explained that the meetings can be redundant, with the same presentation being given both at various committees and at a council meeting. With three council meetings a month, and six council committees, City Manager Katherine Caffrey said “it can be a lot.”
City Manager Caffrey recommended that the City Council consider consolidating and streamlining the meetings to reduce cost and redundancies. She offered that the Study Session every month could become a Committee of the Whole, which would continue to be a less formal format for discussing ideas and plans. She said that, only when there is a real need to dive into something, a specific committee could then meet to address that topic.
This idea passed in a 5:2 vote, on a six-month trial basis, with plans to come back with a progress report at the end of summer. Councilmembers JC Harris and Matt Mahoney both voted against it, with Harris stating that it is a big change that should have had a two-touch process to pass.
As for the Appointive Committees, these meet very infrequently, with sparse agendas and often little understanding of what their roles are. Some of these committees are required by state law, and those won’t be touched. However, Caffrey suggested that three, Parks, Arts, and Senior Services, be merged into one which would be called the Community Enrichment Committee. This would reduce staff time and give the one supercommittee a more robust agenda.
Councilmember Gene Achziger argued for checking with members of those committees to see how this will affect them before enacting this change. Caffrey responded that the committees have not met for quite some time, but staff could reach out to each member, and even to members whose positions have expired and not been reassigned. These volunteer committees will not change at this time, until this feedback has been gathered.
Video
Watch full video of the meeting below:
