Cleveland's new strategic plan focuses on making city government work better

As Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb stepped onto the Music Hall stage in the city’s Public Auditorium on March 5, 2024, it was hard not to lose your place on the continuum of past, present and future.

The mayor’s purpose that day was to introduce his new 10-year operational strategic plan to an audience of some 500 employees—a plan intended to modernize the way government works, make services more accessible, empower the city workforce and improve the city’s financial outlook.

As Bibb spoke about what’s ahead, the setting was a reminder of Cleveland’s storied history and its current challenges. The elegant auditorium opened in 1922, when Cleveland was among America’s largest and most prosperous cities, an industrial and cultural powerhouse. Today, what was once known as “The Sixth City” for its place in the urban pantheon now stands 51st on the population list and is the nation’s second poorest city. Besides symbolizing a bygone era, Public Auditorium is one of many underused assets draining the city’s budget.

Looking forward
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a new mantra in City Hall. In the past, lack of attention to the “infrastructure” of city operations had resulted in outdated technology, run-down facilities, slow hiring and procurement processes and customers frustrated with the difficulty of dealing with City Hall, whether for a birth certificate or a building permit.

The new strategic plan widens the circle of ideas for making Cleveland a model city government. To help create the plan, the city tapped Ernst & Young, a global professional services firm that traces its roots to a small accounting firm started in Cleveland in 1903 by Alwin Ernst and his brother, Theodore.

Where most city strategic plans are about lofty policy goals, Cleveland’s is the rare plan that looks inward. In his opening letter to the plan, Mayor Bibb writes:

Establishing a vision is the first step. This plan is about turning the vision into reality—doing the internal nitty-gritty work of government, in the back offices of City Hall…The initiatives in this plan are not all glamorous, but they are necessary for achieving our great aspirations.

Mayor Bibb’s Chief of Staff, Bradford Davy, sees the strategic plan as a “responsibility to the leaders of tomorrow to solve the bureaucratic challenges of today. Our ability to create a more modern and responsive City Hall not only allows us to execute our own big ideas but also provides the next generation of leaders with better conditions for success.”

Purpose and promise
Cleveland’s strategic plan is made up of several component parts:

A purpose statement defines why city government exists and the impact it wants to make for the city of Cleveland. The statement is meant to inspire employees in their work and assure residents that its leaders are paying attention to the details of service delivery and endeavoring to lift up everyone, regardless of neighborhood or background.

Cleveland’s purpose statement is: To inspire confidence by delivering reliable, efficient city services and creating conditions for all members of our community to thrive.

Six guiding principles explain how city government will go about its work and give leaders a wallet-sized reminder of what they should consider in managing people, solving problems and making decisions:

Focus areas and objectives summarize the results city government aims to achieve with the plan. The short hands for the four focus areas—performance, culture, access and resilience—are easy to remember and serve as mental cues for thinking about continuous improvement, even beyond this plan.

Three measures of success for each focus area are “headline” indicators of city government’s progress toward the results envisioned by the plan, not just completing implementation steps. Examples include the percent of residents who rate city services “excellent” or “good,” the number of city services with a digital self-service option, average time to hire, and net revenue from city-owned properties.

The plan’s 54 initiatives are the specific actions city government will take to meet the objectives. For each initiative, the plan provides a detailed description, expected impact, key next steps and timeline.

Davy argues that the initiatives offer a roadmap that helps answer: “Where do we start, how do we prioritize and when do we say no?”

Examples from each focus area give a flavor of the scope of initiatives:

Putting it together
The process of creating the strategic plan embraced the philosophy that the people who do the work of city government know best what needs fixing, and often how to fix it.

Eric Turk, fleet manager in the Division of Streets, was one of the many staff members who was highly engaged in the process. As an employee who describes himself as “on the ground,” he reflected that, “Having this opportunity really opened my mind as to how we could all work together to better serve the residents.”

Over the course of nine months, the city surveyed 1,000 employees; held 26 staff feedback sessions, briefings and open houses; interviewed more than 100 community and business leaders; and conducted eight workshops with department heads and “city champions” (a group of 50 dedicated staff members from all corners of city government).

Next steps
Bibb has assigned a senior advisor in his office to coordinate and plan implementation, and his Office of Urban Analytics and Innovation has been tasked with standing up a public dashboard to track initiative progress and the measures of success.

The century since Public Auditorium opened its doors has been one of enormous change and challenge for Cleveland. For the city to reach its potential in the next 100 years, its government must be a model of competence and innovation. Its new strategic plan shows the way.

Andrew Kleine is managing director, Government & Public Sector for Ernst & Young LLP. The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ernst & Young LLP or other members of the global EY organization.