By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph mayor John Josendale says he and the city council are hard at work developing new plans to continue St. Joseph growing.
Josendale says this plan developed by the council will look at how to improve the city over the next three and a half years.
"If you look at the way the city is set up and our background, there's a group of people that have put together a 2040 plan with the chamber and everyone involved," Josendale tells host of the KFEQ Hotline Barry Birr. "And it gives you kind of a framework of what to do."
Josendale says the council will look at that 204o plan to decide what issues are important to each councilmember
"Whether it be blight, whether it be homelessness, whether it be cleanliness, I mean crime, we have a whole gambit of things that we're looking at," Josendale says.
Josendale says that will then be put into a plan in which the council will be able to measure how successful they are being with each issue.
Josendale says while the 2040 plan provides a good roadmap for that, each councilmember has their own vision.
"That everybody's being heard, that we're listening to what the people are talking about and what they really want, so coming together as a group and putting that in an outline form that gives us something to work towards," Josendale explains. "And it is also a document that as we go through the next three and a half years of our term, we can work with that and/or add and subtract from it as we go."
Josendale says the strategic plan that himself and the council come up with will act as a good starting point for where things should go over the next three years.
Josendale says this type of plan helps keep a focus on the overall growth of the city. Josendale uses downtown St. Joseph as a perfect example of that.
"Now that there's a lot of excitement about the Children's Discovery Center, and then you put on top of that the new hotel, and in the paper, there was a design of the outside of the new hotel, so those things and then you build on them," Josendale says. "And how do you build around that so that you continue to grow the city in a positive way."
Josendale says with all those things happening downtown he's optimistic about the way things are going and is confident it will continue to positively grow.