Leadership Development in WDM

The better our leadership here in the City, the better services we are able to provide you as citizens. We are very proud of our employees and always concerned about their continued development. That is why we've decided to launch a Leadership Development Program for promising employees who want to move up within the City organization and make a significant contribution to our overall operations. As an organization, it is very important to provide this sort of program in order to educate and identify those employees who are interested in pursuing future leadership opportunities and growing as the City of West Des Moines and our city organization grows.

Tier 1 will be a 10-week time commitment beginning in April. The focus will be to introduce the leadership challenges faced by our organization. We will focus the session around the Balanced Scorecard, a measurement tool we utilize in the City to identify our primary objectives, goals, and service areas and monitor whether or not we are meeting or exceeding expectations and targets. Our Balanced Scorecard themes in the City are Planning and Community Development, Collaboration, Sustainability, Resource Management, Community Enrichment, and Community Safety. We are currently working to create an interactive version of our Scorecard that will eventually be available for your perusal on our website. That will enable you to see directly what initiatives and daily operations the City undertakes and how we are meeting our goals as part of our commitment to you.

As a pilot program, the successes and challenges facing the first tier of employee leaders to go through the process will provide important insights into future iterations of the program. We are really excited to be providing this opportunity within our organization and think that it will pay off in more efficient and innovative service to our residents as well. I will let you know how the program goes later in April or June.

Wells Fargo Campus

4600 tons of steel later, the steel frame erection of the new Wells Fargo Home Mortgage campus is complete. There are currently 400 Wells Fargo team members working on site at the new campus on Mills Civic Parkway. Eventually, the company plans to reach an occupancy of 4300 employees. Construction should be complete by the 4th quarter of 2006, with project completion in early 2007.

Comprehensive Plan Update

The City's Community Development staff has been working on a preliminary draft copy of the Comprehensive Plan Update. The City’s current Comprehensive Plan was adopted in 1993, and included information gathered between 1989 and mid-1993. That information now is 10 years old. West Des Moines’ pace of development, the need to address questions and interest in areas outside the last plan’s study area, and good planning practice call for our current Plan Update effort. The Plan includes information on the history of the City, population and housing statistics, city-wide goals and objectives, action plans, land use designations that guide development, transportation plans, and sub area plans.

Iowa State Code requires that a City’s zoning be based on a comprehensive plan. By definition, it is a general document that is a statement of the City’s policies and intent toward development. The plan provides guidance for the location, form, and function of development and the maintenance of the community. Other plans, efforts, and regulations, such as the City’s Zoning Ordinance, Parks and Recreation Master Plan, CIP, Hazard Mitigation Plan, and Balanced Scorecard are more specific documents that help to implement the broader elements espoused in the Comprehensive Plan.

The preliminary draft of the update to the City of West Des Moines' Comprehensive Plan will be presented to the Plan & Zoning Commission beginning February 22, 2006.

If you are interested in reviewing a copy of the Comprehensive Plan Update, please check the wdmHighlight on our City's front page, where a link to the preliminary draft is available. Soon, an online bulletin board will be available for you to make comments about the plan after reviewing it. I will notify you on this blog and through a notice on the website front page when that bulletin board has been completed and is accessible to you.

Welcome!

I am West Des Moines City Manager Jeff Pomeranz. Communicating with residents is a vital part of any city manager's job, and I consider having informed residents who understand the different functions of a city to be extremely important. It is to this aim that I have decided to start a blog for the City of West Des Moines. I will communicate with you, on a less formal but hopefully educational level, about various activities, accomplishments, and happenings within the City. Please check back in periodically to see updates on what's going on here in West Des Moines! Please feel free to leave comments on individual postings--the comments will not be displayed here, but they will be emailed to me so that I can collect your thoughts and make adjustments based on the feedback and suggestions. Thanks for reading!