FAIRHOPE, Ala. — The City Council took the first step last week for developing a strategic plan for the city. Last fall, a committee report stated that the city’s “lack of a five-year strategic and financial plan is the largest risk factor affecting the future financial integrity of the city.”

The council appointed a committee April 14 to advise the council on how to start the strategic planning process. The committee is expected to meet for the first time next week and report to the council in the near future.

“It has given our staff a sense of direction,” Dothan City Manager Mike West said this week, referring to that city’s strategic planning process initiated in 2005. “It has helped focus our elected officials on what they want to do and how to achieve those goals.”

As Fairhope contemplates its options for strategic planning, the Dothan community holds some lessons for how to approach the task.

Several different groups in Dothan have engaged in strategic planning efforts during the past three years.

“The process is really about deciding what you want to be,” said Mac Holladay of Market Street Services in Atlanta, consultant to an effort led by the Dothan Area Chamber of Commerce and the Wiregrass Foundation. “It’s very important to get a sizable amount of information from local businesses and the community. We use a comprehensive approach that involves surveys, interviews, focus groups, community meetings and a Web site.”

That process led to the development of the Envision Community Strategic Plan, which brought together those groups, as well as the city of Dothan and Houston County as partners to develop a collaborative plan.

Now, Envision is a project staffed by the Dothan Chamber to help implement the strategic plan, through several task forces and more than 300 volunteers.

That large project is now a regional one, including eight other counties.

The group is sponsoring a June summit on the benefits of regionalism.

“Any time that a community can look at itself is a good thing,” said Danny Sharp, president of the Dothan Area Chamber of Commerce Foundation. “The Market Street needs assessment was so interesting and informative. It helped us answer some basic questions about whether we had sufficient social services for our citizens. We learned that we don’t.”

Holladay said one of the important elements of a strategic planning process is the order in which the work is done, and who is involved.

“You need to put together a strong steering committee of diverse interests to sit down together,” he said. “Some people will talk about doing the ‘how’ without discussing the ‘what’ first. We don’t start the process with an end in mind.”

Holladay said that his company’s initial strategic planning approach takes at least six months.

“You can’t do it in a week,” he said.

But strategic planning efforts need not be so extensive.

While the Dothan Chamber and the Wiregrass Foundation engaged in its large regional approach to strategic planning, the city of Dothan undertook a citywide plan with a more limited investment of time and resources.

“Staff and elected officials spent about three days with Lyle,” West said, referring to the work that city did with the assistance of Lyle Sumek of Sumek Associates in Heathrow, Fla. “Lyle has an approach where he lays everything on the table and then comes up with a plan. He forces the stakeholders to develop an action plan for 12 months as well as a five-year plan. If you look at our first-year plan, almost everything we came up with has been completed.”

West said that approach forces the city to make decisions about where to allocate city resources.

“Do you pursue a roads program or improve water and sewer lines?” he said. “These are hard choices.”

But strategic planning helps a city decide how to best make those decisions, he said.

“But it’s not a thing that you can do and then leave alone,” said Thomas Harrison, executive director of the Dothan Chamber and Envision coordinator, referring to whatever strategic plan a community develops. “It will only benefit a community if there is a genuine and serious commitment to follow through.”

For more information about strategic planning efforts in the Dothan area and the consultants they used, visit: www.envisiondothan.com; www.dothan.org; www.wiregrassfoundation.org; www.marketstreetservices.com; www.lylesumek.com.