How to Develop a Strategic Plan for Boca Raton

A strategic plan begins with a deceptively simple question: Where do we want to end up?

For Boca Raton, that question should come before decisions about individual development projects, zoning changes, transportation improvements, housing policies, parks, economic development, or even how City government operates.

It does not mean that a strategic plan can predict or control everything.

There will always be unforeseen events. Hurricanes happen. COVID happened. Supply chains change. Technology changes. Economic conditions change.

There is also a legal environment that a strategic plan cannot ignore. Boca Raton operates within federal law, Florida law, Palm Beach County requirements and other legal constraints. Those rules can change. Proposed changes to property taxation, for example, could significantly affect municipal revenues and require cities throughout Florida to reconsider how services are funded.

At the same time, Boca Raton itself creates part of the legal and regulatory environment within which residents, businesses, property owners and developers operate.

A strategic plan therefore isn’t a promise that everything will happen exactly as anticipated. It establishes the destination while allowing the route to change when circumstances change.

Start With What We Want Boca Raton to Be

We don’t need to make this more complicated than it is.

Boca Raton has nearly a century of history, decades of public decisions, elections, referendums, surveys and civic participation that already tell us a great deal about what residents value.

I would begin with three broad principles:

Live, Work and Play.

Thoughtful Economic Development.

Efficient, Transparent and Accessible City Government.

These principles offer a starting framework for a community conversation about what Boca Raton should be.

Guiding principles – for any organization – need to be few enough that people understand them and that decisions can be made consistent with and measured against them.

The question for residents becomes straightforward: Is this essentially what we want Boca Raton to be? What is missing? What should change?

Live, Work and Play Should Mean Something

“Live, work and play” shouldn’t simply be a phrase used to market a development.

It should describe life in Boca Raton.

Live begins at home. I want my home to be my refuge and the neighborhood around it to feel like a neighborhood – safe, connected and a place where neighbors recognize one another. Extend that idea across the 100,000 of us who live here, and it becomes part of the character of Boca Raton itself.

Work adds another dimension.

Boca Raton is home to major employers and small businesses. They are our corporate citizens. A strategic economic development effort should ask how we can increase the opportunity for people who live in Boca Raton to work here as well.

Someone who lives here, works here and spends earnings here contributes to a beneficial economic cycle. There is a direct affordability benefit for individual residents and families. Working closer to home reduces the time and expense associated with a long-distance commute. There is generally more loyalty and less turnover when local residents work at local businesses. And there is a potential transportation benefit from shorter commutes and changes in traffic times and patterns.

Play is equally important.

Public recreation has been part of Boca Raton’s identity for generations. City parks, neighborhood parks, beaches and the Greater Boca Raton Beach and Park District reflect a long-standing community commitment to public recreational space.

Our strategic planning should consider both passive and active recreation.

And play extends beyond parks.

It includes our museums, libraries, cultural organizations, the Festival of the Arts, restaurants and other destinations. It raises questions about parking, transportation, pedestrian and bicycle safety and how people move between these places.

Those aren’t separate issues. They are interconnected parts of the community we are trying to create.

Six Pillars Supporting the Vision

Great brands – and Boca Raton is an admired local, national and international brand – have pillars that support their fundamental principles. Staying consistent with those pillars helps keep individual decisions true to the strategic vision.

The three principles describe the Boca Raton we want. The six pillars identify the major areas in which City decisions must consistently support that vision:

Population Growth and Economic Development
Urban Center – Downtown for Everyone
Transportation
Community & Public Safety
Parks, Environment & Quality of Life
Financial Responsibility

Boca First

None of this means being against development.

Economic development creates jobs, increases the tax base for a well-run City and contributes to the vitality of Boca Raton. We should welcome good development.

But the sequence matters.

Boca First means deciding what is best for Boca Raton as a whole before deciding how any individual proposal fits within it.

We shouldn’t define Boca Raton according to whatever individual projects happen to arrive at City Hall.

We should define Boca Raton first and then determine how development, infrastructure, economic policy, parks, housing, transportation and City government can help achieve that vision.

Developers make investment decisions based upon their assessment of opportunity and risk. The City has a different responsibility.

Its responsibility is to the community as a whole and to the generations that will live with today’s decisions long after individual projects have been completed.

That is why Boca Raton needs a strategic plan.

Development Doesn't Have to Stop While We Plan

There is a legitimate concern here.

Property owners and developers may already have projects underway. They may have spent substantial sums on architects, engineers, attorneys, financing and planning. Time has economic consequences.

A strategic planning effort should not automatically bring economic development to a halt.

Nor should applicants be treated as adversaries.

They should be participants in the process, particularly because many possess information and experience useful to the City.

But participation is different from controlling the outcome.

A development team naturally advocates for its project. The City’s responsibility is broader: to consider that project alongside every other project and against the long-term interests of the entire community.

That suggests a practical early task for the City Manager, Council and appropriate staff: understand what is actually in the development pipeline.

What projects are pending? At what stage? Which are routine matters consistent with existing zoning? Which involve significant land-use changes? Which may materially affect transportation or other infrastructure?

We shouldn’t assume that every pending application presents the same strategic question.

Once we understand the pipeline, Planning and Zoning and other departments can consider how pending projects should be reviewed while the broader strategic work proceeds.

The objective isn’t delay.

It’s coordination.

A Practical Roadmap to Next Spring

The objective should be to arrive at the City’s strategic planning discussions next spring with substantially more information, community direction and integration than we have today.

None of this needs to become an enormous new bureaucratic staff exercise.

We don’t need years to do it.

And we don’t need consultants to tell us what we should decide.

We aren’t beginning with a blank sheet of paper. We are testing and improving a framework based on what decades of community decisions have already told us.

The City has ways to reach residents. Establish the initial three-principles framework and their six supporting pillars and begin asking residents whether they reflect the Boca Raton they want.

Use existing City communications, online participation and the next bi-monthly utility-bill cycle to broaden participation.

That could reasonably give the Council meaningful community input within 90 days without creating months of meetings, charrettes and consultant-driven exercises.

And rather than waiting months for a finished report, place a 10- to 15-minute strategic planning progress report on every City Council workshop agenda.

Staff does not need to present slides rehashing the entire process. This should be a concise progress report: what has been accomplished, what has been learned, what remains unanswered and what comes next, with time for Council questions and direction as appropriate.

These workshops also give the City Manager and staff an opportunity to test emerging ideas with Council as the work progresses, get direction and refine the most promising ideas before spring.

That gives elected officials and residents the opportunity to watch the plan develop, correct its direction and prevent months of work from heading toward an outcome Council or the community never wanted.

By the time the City reaches its strategic planning discussions next spring, Council should not be beginning with an empty conference-room whiteboard.

It should have a tested statement of where residents want Boca Raton to go; an integrated picture of development and infrastructure; a clearer understanding of housing, employment and transportation relationships; input from corporate and civic institutions; identified operational opportunities within City government; and a set of practical choices about how to move forward.

Then the strategic planning session becomes what it ought to be:

Not a search for a vision.

A discussion about how to achieve one.

Build the Team Without Building a New Bureaucracy

There is an understandable response to all of this: Who is going to do the work?

City employees already have jobs. Adding a strategic planning effort shouldn’t mean simply adding another major assignment to the workload of existing departments.

It doesn’t have to.

Council’s job is to establish the direction. The City Manager’s job is to organize the team capable of getting the work done.

Boca Raton has resources available to it well beyond the people already working at City Hall.

Where the volume of work requires additional hands, the City can bring in experienced professionals accustomed to doing this kind of work. Their job isn’t to tell Boca Raton what its vision should be. Their job is to do the legwork – collect information, reconcile it, organize it, map it, tabulate it and present it in ways that allow staff, Council and the public to understand it.

Let City staff direct the questions. Let others help do the legwork.

The same principle applies to Boca Raton’s corporate citizens – both major employers and small businesses.

They should be involved early, not because they should determine the vision, but because they are part of the community and can help achieve it.

The question put to them should not simply be, “What does your company need?”

It should be, “How can your company help us achieve the community Boca Raton’s residents say they want – and how can Boca Raton help you succeed as part of that community?”

That changes the relationship from advocacy to collaboration.

It also makes this an achievable undertaking rather than another massive City project.

Council can set an ambitious direction without micromanaging the process. The City Manager can assemble and lead the team. Staff can provide knowledge and direction without being expected to perform every hour of the work themselves.

Combine the Information We Already Have

The work can occur in parallel, so let’s get started now.

Staff can direct assembling information already available. What’s the current status of the development projects in the pipeline with Planning and Zoning and related Boards. What are the road capacities matched with traffic information already on-hand? What’s our affordable and workforce housing inventory? What’s the most recent census and demographic information and how does that impact on our housing, parks and recreation needs, relevant infrastructure data and other existing planning information?”

The City, County, applicants and their professionals have accumulated enormous amounts of information about roads, traffic counts, infrastructure capacity and development impacts.

The problem is not a lack of information.

The problem is that we look at things one project at a time.

Consider several major projects now being discussed or anticipated around Boca Raton. A redevelopment at Town Center may contain a traffic analysis. A proposed land-use change elsewhere may contain another. A major residential conversion may contain another.

Each study may make sense when viewed within the boundaries of its own project.

But residents don’t experience traffic one development at a time.

The City should begin looking across major projects to understand their combined effects.

If several projects affect the same extended road network, staff should be able to see those impacts together, not simply the roads immediately adjacent to each individual project. The same principle applies, where appropriate, to water, sewer, stormwater, public safety and other infrastructure.

This doesn’t require developers to share proprietary information with one another. It means information submitted to the City should also help the City understand the larger picture.

Combined analysis may show that the infrastructure can comfortably accommodate the development.

Good.

Perhaps it identifies a future constraint that can be mitigated.

Good. Now we know before the problem arrives.

Or perhaps it tells us that some proposed intensity simply cannot be supported without unacceptable consequences.

We need to know that too.

That is foresight, and foresight is one of the principal purposes of strategic planning.

Make Government Itself Part of the Strategy

A strategic plan should also examine how City government works.

The goal should be an efficient, transparent and publicly accessible government that continually improves its operations.

Artificial intelligence may provide useful tools. So will other technologies. But technology should not become the strategy.

The more durable principle is continuous improvement.

Best practices on quality and systems improvement emphasize, among other things, understanding processes and involving the people closest to the work in improving them.

City employees often know exactly where unnecessary steps, delays and duplication exist.

Ask them.

Measure proposed improvements. Determine whether they actually save time, reduce burdens or improve service. Use data rather than assumptions.

And approach efficiency as good management, not as a euphemism for indiscriminate job cutting. Attrition, retirement, retraining and advancement from within can all be part of thoughtful workforce planning.

The City Manager and his team bring the practical experience needed to turn the community’s direction and Council’s priorities into realistic opportunities for action.

A well-run City is the Pillar of Fiscal Responsibility and enables every other strategic objective easier to achieve.

Now What?

Like any major undertaking, the hardest is the first step. There’s nothing hard, per se, about creating a good strategic plan. What’s hard is making the commitment to a consistent on-going effort to gather the details to make informed decisions about tactical alternatives.

Zoning is a tactic. Transportation improvements are tactics. Capital spending is a tactic. Housing policies are tactics. Economic-development programs are tactics. Technology and artificial intelligence, where genuinely useful, are tactics.

But informed decisions are the best (perhaps the only) way to create a consensus-driven present and future for Boca Raton.

The strategy is the successful outcome of the work that comes before it.

The great opportunity in front of the current City Council is to direct that the leg work be done in time for the 2027 Spring Strategic Planning meeting. That journey will join Council, Staff and Residents to achieve a joint vision of Boca Raton now and going forward for decades.

Success next spring means Council has three to five practical, budgeted action items it can approve and put into action quickly.