City Council - Regular Meeting

I'm Kim Learnard, mayor of Peach Tree City. I'm Justin Strickland. I'm the city manager of Peach Tree City. Michael Pichek, first-term council member for Peach Tree City.

And here we are in beautiful Kennesaw for a city council leadership retreat. We're spending two full days working on team building, project prioritization, and strategic planning. We're enjoying Kennesaw. We enjoyed meeting with four city council members yesterday, and we heard from the Kennesaw mayor this morning to kick us off. So, it's interesting and fun and um certainly productive to look at what other cities are doing and identify best practices that we can bring back home. Retreats are essential for uh myself and for staff because it lets us be able to get together with council in a uh non-regular meeting setting and start to set goals, ask council what their goals are for the next year uh for future years. It helps with the planning process. It lets our council be able to talk with each other and staff together, which they don't often get to do. Usually, their interactions are just through me. And so with a retreat, they actually get to talk with other departments, other staff. And uh the biggest thing is really just goal setting and talking about future things. Them talking about ideas they have with each other and projects that they want to see completed that they talk with citizens about what the vision is going to be for Peach Tree City moving forward and what things we need to focus on uh as an organization for the future year. Personally for me, this is my first time, my first council retreat, and it's important for me to get my feet wet across all these different avenues and areas of our city, understanding what the needs of our staff are, understanding what the priorities of my peers and council are and seeing where we can find consensus and learn more about challenges, and most importantly, understand what some feasible solutions are to move future city forward.