Saskatoon city unveils strategic plan for next four years

The City of Saskatoon is out with its strategic plan, meant to guide city priorities for the next four years. Keenan Sorokan reports.

The City of Saskatoon has released its strategic plan, which is meant to guide the city’s overall priorities from 2026 to 2029.

The plan unveiled to the city’s governance and priorities committee on Wednesday also showed a number of changes, additions and removals.

The plan is built around what the city calls “core pillars: advance city council priorities and build a high-performing organization.” Council priorities are grouped into 10 categories ranging from core services, transportation, downtown, and economic development.

However, it was two other priorities that got most of the attention Wednesday.

“Two of the priorities that are getting a little extra attention are homelessness and housing, as well as community safety, because, again, we hear from the citizens that those are important to them,” Richard Phillips, the city’s chief strategy and transformation officer, said.

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To help build a better organization, priorities have outcome goals listed next to them, with key performance indicators to help measure the success of each item, which became problematic for some items that needed changes or revisions.

One example included in the city’s list of revisions was a drop-in centre with a winter plan open every hour of the year.

“That is only because we don’t have the ability to collect that data at this point in time,” Phillips said. “So it wasn’t left in the plan.”

That left some councillors questioning if the drop-in centre was removed from the strategic plan. Phillips said it wasn’t, as work continues while administration endeavours to collect actionable data over the next four years.

“These are provincial run programs. There’s a lot of privacy information related to the data. We have been actively working with (the province) to figure out what kind of data the city can get and what kind of data the city could publish,” City Manager Jeff Jorgenson said.

One item that was removed from the plan’s community safety and well-being section was supporting the formation of neighbourhood watch and patrol with the Saskatoon Police Service through the city’s website.

Seventy-seven per cent of respondents to the survey said they feel somewhat or very safe within their neighbourhood, helping contribute to the city dropping that item from its plans.

“The conversation there was that it’s not a priority to put into the strategic plan, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not something that the city would support or something that couldn’t happen,” Phillips said.

Of the 23 per cent of people who did not feel as safe within their neighbourhood, when asked for ways to improve safety, 46 per cent said to increase enforcement of laws and 44 per cent wanted more police patrols in the neighbourhood.

Phillips said 1,743 residents responded to the survey, which is an increase of 224 per cent compared to the previous strategic survey.