Using a $20,000 Duke Energy grant, the city of Apopka intends to revise its five-year strategic plan, which will be fleshed out over the following months for a possible presentation and adoption before the City Council later this year.
“The City of Apopka is in the process of updating its five-year strategic plan, which is meant to serve as a road map for decisions regarding the city’s future,” the city website states. “The strategic plan will incorporate feedback from the community and key stakeholders and is meant to establish the city’s mission, vision, priorities and goals.”
At the July 17, 2024, City Council meeting, then-economic development director Michelle Boylan announced she applied for and was awarded the $20,000 Duke Energy grant to offset the cost of the strategic plan.
Currently, the city is collecting feedback on social media. In addition, the city will organize three community forums where the public can give in-person input. The forums will take place Aug. 13 and 14 in the Apopka City Hall council chambers. Each meeting will be 90 minutes long and have the same presentations, both of which will be live streamed on the city’s YouTube channel.
The current strategic plan revision is different from the Grow Apopka 2025 initiative, which was completed in 2015-2016 with intense community input in how to navigate the city’s growth and function over the following decade and beyond.
Although the current initiative will have “some characteristics” to Grow Apopka 2025, they are two different projects, especially in light of how the current initiative will address what happened in the last 10 years, Mayor Bryan Nelson said.
“[We] want to update it and dust it off,” he said.
BerryDunn is the group putting together the project.
The city is revising its strategic plan because of the pandemic’s effects on the community and citizens’ way of life.
“Things have changed,” Nelson said. “We’ve gone through COVID … So we just want to make sure that the vision lines up with what our constituents want it to look like.”
“More people [are] working from home,” Nelson continued. “Retails [have] changed, so it’s just all those kinds of things and how that impacts our community so we will make sure that our vision lines up with the new world order.”
The strategic planning is also a separate project from the city’s current rewrite of the comprehensive plan. Comprehensive plan revisions would by comprised of housing, infrastructure, future land use, capital improvements, resilience and sustainability element, open space and more. The comprehensive plan was last adopted in 2009.
“You want to be complimentary, but … it’s on its own—a different path,” Nelson said. “Both will have public input, but this [strategic plan revision] is just more of a vision about not only the comprehensive plan, but what we want to look like from across all the spectrum.”
The pandemic’s impact on Apopka itself caused more people to work remotely and more people interested in outdoor activities such as biking and walking. Because more people are working from home, they receive more deliveries which necessitates warehouses that ship out products directly to houses, Nelson explained.
Users have been leaving comments on the city’s SocialPinPoint site, covering topics such as building up and revitalizing the downtown area, stormwater drains, halting new development, and assisting the homeless.
For more information about the strategic plan initiative and to give feedback, visit shorturl.at/ai5kX.
Strategic plan community forum schedule
Wednesday, Aug. 13, 6-7:30 p.m.
Strategic Planning Community Forum #1 in City Council Chambers
Thursday, Aug. 14, 10-11:30 a.m.
Strategic Planning Community Forum #2 in City Council Chambers
Thursday, Aug. 14, 1-2:30 p.m.
Strategic Planning Community Forum #3 in City Council Chambers
The Apopka Chief and The Planter are weekly community newspapers, independently owned and family operated, that have served the greater Apopka area in Central Florida since 1923 and 1965 respectively.
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