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ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS WORK SESSION AGENDA ITEM ABSTRACT Meeting Date: September 14, 2006 Action Agenda Item No. 2 SUBJECT: County Priorities DEPARTMENT: County Manager PUBLIC HEARING: (Y/N) No ATTACHMENT(S): Dictionary Definitions Tables -January 2006 Priorities/Goals 1/20/06 BOCC Retreat Materials re: Priorities INFORMATION CONTACT: Rod Visser, 919-245-2308 NOTE: This item is carried forward from the 8/31/06 work session Excerpt from 1/20/06 BOCC Minutes Excerpt from 1/31/06 BOCC Minutes PURPOSE: To discuss and provide direction to staff regarding top BOCC priorities for the remainder of calendar year 2006. BACKGROUND: During Fall 2005, staff and the Board pursued a process through which Commissioners identified a wide range of policy and program matters that they considered priorities that should be addressed in the short-to near term. The Board spent time at the annual planning retreat on .lanuary 20, 2006, and at a subsequent work session on January 31, 2006 discussing the status of these priorities, plus the mast recent set of goal statements that had been prepared for the Board's review (at the January 2002 retreat). Relevant excerpts from the minutes of both January 2006 meetings are attached for the Board's review. The Board's discussion at the time stopped short of identifying the handful of top priorities out of the group to which the staff should foremost attend. Progress has been made on a wide range of the priorities cited, and other potential priority program and policy matters have emerged during succeeding months. Staff believe this is an opportune time for the Board to review and discuss previously identified priorities as well as any others that have arisen since January 2006. The desired result of that discussion would be approval by the Board of a list of a half- dozen or so top priorities for the remainder of calendar year 2006. The Board may wish to have a discussion about what the terms "goal", "objective", and "priority" imply vis-a-vis the Board's process for establishing, maintaining, and amending as necessary its annual workplan. Dictionary definitions of these terms are included in a separate attachment to the abstract. With regard to the County's historical practice of establishing and producing formal written goal statements beginning in the early 1990s, goals have tended to reflect broad policy interests/statements of the BOCC, with multiple objectives frequently being identified under a particular goal to bring a higher degree of specificity to one or more outcomes the Board may wish to achieve. Staff have typically gone several layers deeper than that to identify individual action steps that staff members or others must take to lead in a timely way to the desired outcomes stated for each objective.