The City of Santa Clarita has built a reputation for being a forward-thinking organization that sets a vision and explores creative solutions that meet the community’s current and future needs. Now that we have wrapped up our previous five-year strategic plan, Santa Clarita 2020, we are looking ahead to the future with Santa Clarita 2025.
The City’s next strategic plan maintains our commitment to providing the high-quality services and facilities that residents deserve and expect.
Developing Santa Clarita 2025 was an inclusive process guided by the feedback received from the community. This information was gathered at public meetings as well as from our biannual Public Opinion Poll, the Community Development Block Grant community needs assessment survey, the Parks and Recreation Workplan, the Arts Master Plan and the City’s General Plan.
Some of the priorities in Santa Clarita 2025 include guiding the community through pandemic recovery, enhancing park facilities, opening and programing the new Canyon Country Community Center, completing the Sheriff’s Station, maintaining the beauty and sustainability of our City and preserving Santa Clarita’s reputation as a safe City – just to name a few.
Under the Building and Creating Community theme, the priority will be building vital infrastructure and providing services and programs that enrich a growing and diverse community.
After what was an incredibly rough year for our local businesses, Enhancing Economic Vitality will be more important in the next five years than ever before. By collaborating with the Santa Clarita Valley Economic Development Corporation and the Chamber of Commerce, we will work to attract more businesses and jobs to our City.
Under the theme of Community Beautification and Sustainability, City staff will continue the median beautification program. With Community Engagement, the goal is to ensure that the community is involved in, and aware of, all the City organization is doing on their behalf.
With a renewed call for social justice and equality throughout the last year, the revamping of the Human Relations Roundtable was a crucial element in helping the community eliminate all forms of racism and discrimination. Along these lines, we will also research and consider a feasible location for a Santa Clarita Cultural Center.
The Organizational Excellence theme will focus on Human Resources initiatives, technological efficiencies and addressing our legislative priorities.
The Public Safety theme focuses on keeping Santa Clarita a safe community by providing high-quality public safety services and facilities while preserving the integrity of our neighborhoods.
Maintaining the safety and quality of our streets falls under the Sustaining Public Infrastructure theme, which includes the annual Overlay and Slurry Seal program.
This is just a small sample of the nearly 100 action items the City will take on over the next five years. While this is a very ambitious undertaking, with the leadership of our City Council and the hard work from City staff, Santa Clarita will continue to be the thriving and desirable City we are all proud to call home.
Ken Striplin can be reached at kstriplin@santa-
clarita.com. The views expressed in his column are those of the City and do not necessarily reflect those of The Signal.
