Increased civic engagement a priority for city

During their second meeting of July, the city board of directors adopted a list of goals they hope to achieve between now and 2020.

The list highlights six aspects of the public sector that are common to a majority of urban communities: economic growth and development, finance, infrastructure, planning and code enforcement, parks and communication. These areas are accompanied by a goal statement and one or more objective(s), and each objective is followed by an analysis that states how that objective is to be carried out.

Due to the rather ambiguous nature of each of these six

since they were adopted, the Herald-Leader has made an effort to convey further details regarding each one. So far, all but one has been addressed; which is why today, the focus will shift to the city’s goal for communication.

The objectives also have city officials to which they are assigned and one individual tasked with the oversight and execution of this goal is Community Development Director Don Clark. The board identified one objective it intends to achieve as it pertains to the issue, which is listed below along with its goal statement and more details that Clark provided.

Goal statement

• Increase citizen engagement.

Objective

• Research methods that would expand communications to residents in a way that increases community engagement and lets citizens know about things such as different achievements made by the city or its employees.

The timeline for the completion of this goal is slated for the second quarter of 2019, and no concrete methods or approaches have been determined at this time, Clark said. The analysis states that it will aim to accomplish these things by developing new, or maintaining existing information distribution systems in such a way that they reach a larger audience. Citywide text message notifications, e-newsletters and booths representing the city at different events that take place are all things being considered.

To measure the success of their efforts, city staff will set benchmarks they hope to reach in a few different areas. This means setting a quota on the amount of information distributed that pertains to the city or its accomplishments, the number of people signed up for notifications through the city’s website, levels of social media participation and even the amount of people applying to participate in different commissions and boards across the city’s departments.

Currently, the city’s communications efforts primarily take place online, Clark said. There is siloam springs.com, which serves as the city’s main website as well as discoversiloam.com, which Clark said is a collaborative effort between Main Street Siloam, the Chamber of Commerce and the city, intended to promote tourism in the area.

There is also whysiloam.com, a website largely intended to promote economic development by showcasing entities the city has to offer, such as John Brown University, as well as a range of additional information. This includes anything from the cost of living index for someone in Siloam Springs, projected population growth or average household incomes.

Other avenues of communication the city uses to reach out to citizens include social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter. These outlets are administered by City Communications Director Holland Hayden, and while Clark said she does a great job of doing so and that these platforms tend to garner some public opinion, they do not necessarily guarantee the overall goal the city is trying to accomplish.

“( The goal statement is a reference to) civic engagement,” Clark said. “We need public input when we are doing something such as planning out a project. To give you a prime example, Memorial Park. We had great turnout (at the public meeting that was held) for that, but then other times we have held public input meetings and there was not a great turnout. So, obviously they were not engaged enough to be able to get the information of the date the public input meeting would be held so that we could have gotten their information and gathered their feedback.

“I think what we have now as far as Twitter or Facebook is great, we are going to get that feedback (there), but sometimes when it comes to larger planning items, we really would like to see a better turnout at the meetings or elsewhere. Whether it be the city’s design standards or the comprehensive plan, we are going to need a lot of public input moving forward. We just have to figure out the best way to get it.”