Strategic Vision Plan

Eureka: a historic city embracing the future while honoring its natural ancestral heritage, where safety, inclusivity, sustainability, and innovation converge to create a vibrant and thriving community for all.

 -Eureka leadership five-year vision


The City of Eureka recently engaged the professional services of Berke Brown consulting to help guide productive strategic visioning for the City and orient leadership towards shared, actionable goals. The process of strategic visioning included the creation of shared values and goals at multiple levels of vision, allowing leadership to have consistent and actionable milestones over a broader five year timeline. This meant that in addition to the overarching five-year vision for the City described above, smaller two-year goals and one-year targets were articulated and agreed upon to ensure consistency and increase likelihood of success. 

The two-year goals focused on specific action items for the four areas of strategic visioning: Effective Governance and Communication, Economic Development, Health & Safety, and Community Pride (possibly to be re-named Quality of Life), and the targeted one-year goals were similarly broken down into the four divisions of strategic planning. This creates accountability and reliability, with actionable targets laid out along reasonable timelines allowing leadership, employees, and community members to track the progress of different initiatives and better understand the way different areas of municipal practice function together. 

In addition to the two-year goals and one-year targets, 90-day milestones were also identified and articulated in order to ensure accountability and track progress. The objectives of these milestones are even more specific than the two-and-one-year goals, with short-term items broken down into smaller more manageable tasks. 

The process of strategic visioning allowed City leadership to articulate, at every level, their vision for success as a municipality and the specified goals and tasks that would allow that unified vision to be realized. The practice gained in articulating visions, goals, values, and actionable tasks was valuable for City leadership who often work in the semi-isolation from one-another within their specific department or roles. Having a shared vision for City progress and specific steps towards that vision is important to our leadership team and the City as a whole.

During this process, leadership focused on three key initiatives they believed would demonstrate the primary goal of Effective Governance and Communication. Those initiatives were Community Pride (Quality of Life), Economic Development, and Health & Safety (or community viability). The specified goals and milestones for these areas can be seen in brief in the table below.

Goal TypeEffective Governance
Economic Development
Health & Safety
Community Pride
Two Year Goals
  • Unified public relations effort
  • Effective labor relations
  • Employee development (BCLA)
  • Systematize DEI - recruit
  • Adequate low/no barrier shelter (with capacity for all)
  • Update LCP
  • ADU financing
  • Address vacancy issues
  • Expand CARE/CSET to 24/7 response teams
  • Bay to Zoo trail
  • Construct Public Works Operations Complex and EOC
  • Adopt the Climate Action Plan
  • Implement a public education plan for City Services
  • Comprehensive Maintenance Plan for parks
  • Greenways and gulches ordinance
  • Complete park projects
One Year Targets
  • Retention/recruit through unified negotiations strategy
  • Annual Town Halls
  • Working group with NGOs (incl faith orgs) for unhoused initiatives
  • DEI training services (in-house)
  • Game plan for dumpsters
  • Build ADU financing program framework & initiate three projects
  • Lighting plan for Old Town
  • Navigation Center - initiate build
  • Corp Yard/EOC - Site, design, and start
  • Work with county to expand Semper Virens capacity
  • Retention bonus/longevity pay
  • Research and report on safe use sites
  • Hire maintenance worker for Waterfront trail
  • PR checklist
  • Update street tree guidelines
  • Encouraging community engagement through events and collaboration
Milestone examples (see PDF for full milestone breakdown)
  • Present labor market data
  • Establish council member budgets for town halls
  • Identify lead staff for unified PR target
  • Negotiate and communicate with business owners
  • Meet with internal stateholders re: lighting plan
  • Draft LUP on website
  • Complete concept design for EOC/Corp yard
  • Develop list of safe use sites with positive/negative impact and report to council
  • interview representative sample of healthcare representitives
  • Incorporate hiring into FY budget
  • Draft PR plan
  • Draft updates for street tree guidelines for public review
  • Survey public about neighborhood district designations


For the PDF breakdown of the five, two, and one year goals (as well as the full description of 90-day milestones) see Eureka Strategic Visioning FY 2023-24.

To read more about the process of strategic visioning and the role the professional consultant played, read the full story.

This is not the first time the City has created Strategic Visioning Plans! View the Strategic Vision Plan Archives to learn more about Strategic Visioning at the City of Eureka.