The Greenbelt City Council retreat on December 10 was the first of two gatherings to set council’s goals for the next two years. This first session focused on team building and setting up a productive method for tackling the goals. It set the ground rules to, in the words of facilitator Maryland Municipal League Senior Director for Leadership Development Tom Reynolds, “give a place for consensus.” Reynolds had played the same role at a similar retreat in 2023.
All councilmembers were present: Frankie Fritz, Emmett Jordan, Amy Knesel, Danielle McKinney, Jenni Pompi, Silke Pope and Kristen Weaver. City Manager Josué Salmerón was the eighth participant.
The atmosphere was relaxed but purposeful and gave the onlooker, used to seeing council in its normal more controlling role, insight into how these seven individuals function as a team behind the scenes. It was a productive mix of shared goals, commitment to the city and care for its people.
Preliminaries
Reynolds, without being dictatorial, was gently effective in keeping the meeting on task. Each exercise was designed to shape the desired outcomes by establishing ground rules, focusing on outcomes, understanding how to behave productively in goal setting and beginning to establish priorities and common ground. He covered individual interaction styles – inherently reminding each individual of their style of interaction and priorities and reinforcing the principles of mutual respect.
Challenges
After working with the group to set rules for participation in terms of mutual respect, honesty, positivity and openness to new ideas, Reynolds asked councilmembers to name the greatest challenges council faces today and, unsurprisingly, most centered on budget.
They were expressed variously as growing the tax base, the impact of local federal job losses and dealing with the effects of rising prices. In the mix there also emerged the interesting concept of Greenbelt proactively growing its own economy – one relying less on federal employment. Concerns centered around working with local and state jurisdictions to care for residents who face food and housing insecurity.
There was consensus that the city’s current budget was unsustainable and that there would need to be cuts in services unless the city’s tax base grew – a tough proposition in the current climate. Councilmembers Fritz and Knesel were curious to see how other places and countries have coped with similar hard times.
Community Input
City residents would have been pleased to hear that councilmembers’ first and unanimous priority was to do right by them: to foster a collaborative and engaged city with support for those in need.
Councilmembers were keen to take the feedback they had received on city activities during their door-knocking efforts when canvassing for the election and to integrate that information with the results of the community survey in setting goals for the future.
McKinney offered the intriguing prospect of a community focus meeting in which a big dollar bill representing the budget could be cut into segments proportional in area to the budget allocations for city functions like public safety, recreation and public works, graphically representing the hard decisions that must be made with capped resources.
Goal Setting Prep
These exercises were the introduction to the ultimate purpose of the retreat, scheduled for realization in the second session: to determine council’s goals for the next two years. This meeting was to ready its members to tackle the task most effectively.
After some discussion, the group decided on a homework exercise where each would go through the 10 areas and 43 goals listed in the 2023 City Council Planning Framework to note which they thought had been accomplished, which were in progress and which were no longer relevant. Fritz suggested using a single online collaborative document put together by McKinney from tables she’d constructed in 2023.
The annotated list would then be the current status starting point and the second session on Monday, December 15 would update the remaining goals and add new ones for the next two years.
