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Since January, the council has been working on a plan for what it would like the city to accomplish in the remainder of their term and beyond. Priorities ranged from revitalizing New Hampshire Avenue and reducing crime in troublesome neighborhoods to strengthening rental housing laws and allowing residents to pay city fees online.

Discussion in July centered on whether to make goals specific or general, with several councilmembers stressing that specific aims are needed to make substantive changes.

Discussion Tuesday focused on details of a proposal by City Councilman Josh Wright (Ward 1) that borrowed from a 2008 plan by Colorado Springs and outlined three goals: city sustainability through increased and long-term city business development, making the city a more livable community by cracking down on crime and providing more recreational activities, and ensuring the delivery of quality city services.

After the goals outlined in each section, Wright included several "key indicators" that became the focus of much of the discussion.

Wright thought the indicators should be what he called "outcome-based" in order to help the city determine the progress made toward the overall goals in the strategy. Wright's outcome-based evaluations would determine a city officials' accomplishment in terms of how many cases the official closed instead of simply the volume of citations issued.

Other members had slightly different views on how the city should go about evaluating the success of the plan's goals. Councilman Terry Seamens (Ward 4) argued for "budget-based" indicators that would examine how much a program, such as increased recycling, had cost and determine by its results if the initiative had been worth the money spent.

Mayor Bruce Williams centered more of his comments on trying to limit the scope of the proposed projects so that they could actually be accomplished. He explained how city employees, who will work under City Manager Barbara Burns Matthews to implement the council's strategy, would be discouraged by lofty, daunting goals that might look good on paper but could prove impossible to achieve.

Matthews limited much of her comments to the importance of providing her staff and the city departments with clear ideas of what exactly the council had in mind for the future.

"I think the key for me and … the rest of the staff is to have a sense of what the council's policy priorities are and truly where you want to get; what does success look like?" Matthews said. "It's fairly important to me to know where you ultimately want to get."

Many of the strategy's projects are long-term and unlikely to develop soon, even within the next year. But despite the slow pace set by the session, Wright was optimistic regarding the council's ultimate timeline.

"Generally, at the end of the discussion I think most people were on the same page," he said. "This process is difficult because you try to focus on what's best for the city overall and you have seven individuals on the council who have different ideas."

Wright expects revision suggestions from the other council members to be returned to him by Monday at the latest, and, if his rewrites are approved by the council, the strategy can be passed to Matthews and the city staff for additional comments and eventual implementation.