The City of Moose Jaw continues to move forward with its strategic plan. 

In an update to city council on Monday, city administration shared that a strategic planning session was held for city council and the strategic leadership group on March 3, 2021, with Doug Griffith, author of “13 Ways to Kill your Community.” 

The goal of the meeting was to update, revise and fine-tune the objectives in the city’s strategic plan. 

“One of the things that I have really appreciated about our strategic plan and how our council and mayor have worked on this is that this is filled with action items and measurable ways to be accountable to our stakeholders and to the citizens that we serve,” said Coun. Crystal Froese. 

New initiatives that came out of the meeting were: 

  • A Climate Action Plan 
  • A Downtown Enhancement Plan to share the city’s heritage and history 
  • Marketing Moose Jaw 
  • Taking action with more videos and working with analytics to paint positive pictures that tells Moose Jaw’s story. 
  • Create offices and meeting spaces downtown that can be rented by the day, week, month or year. 
  • Develop a list of companies that would fit the vision for agri-food processing companies and proactively prospect them to consider Moose Jaw. 

Some of the highlights when it comes to the city’s strategic plan included: 

  • Progress for People and Culture objectives including the hiring of an Economic Development Coordinator for downtown and Indigenous engagement. 
  • The fifth highest year of building permits on record. 
  • Nearly $1 billion invested into Moose Jaw over the past four years. 
  • Major progress towards upgrading enterprise resource planning software 
  • Cost savings and revenue generation of over $1 million annually. 
  • Solar Panel and Climate Action Plan have been implemented. 
  • “Get a Life” marketing plan 
  • More than 100 projects and actions have been identified under the Entrepreneurial Civic Administration. 

The city plans to have a branding exercise meeting in August of 2022 Gair Maxwell, who helped create the “Notorious” brand. The next strategic plan update meeting is scheduled to be held in early 2023. 

“We generally held off this year because of the byelection and so in 2023, we'll again have two full years to work together to create more objectives to progress and grow our community,” said City Manager Jim Puffalt. 

The city’s strategic plan began in June of 2018, when city council and the strategic leadership team has a planning session with Griffith. The session helped the city identify new opportunities, actions and plans that would help the community move forward into the future.