St. Louis County government now has an Office of Strategy and Innovation. The office was pulled out of the Department of Planning to put a vision for the county into motion.
County Executive Steve Stenger has been touting the need for a comprehensive strategy in St. Louis County since his campaign. Now six months into his administration, the county council has officially approved the creation of an office tasked with that plan.
“We have to have a road map for where we’re going. And that road map has to include measureables,” Stenger said when he sat down with St. Louis Public Radio to discuss the new office. “If we were a business and we were conducting ourselves as we have for the last 15 years in St. Louis County without a strategy — without a real strategy — we’d be out of business.”
Lori Fiegel, the new head of the strategy office, also joined the discussion. Fiegel has worked for the St. Louis County planning department for more than 20 years, and was instrumental in creating the county’s 2013 strategic plan under the auspices of Charlie Dooley.
Fiegel said she and her team of four employees have been putting plans together for years, but they didn’t have the authority to make sure other departments followed those plans.
“We do a lot of analysis, we do a lot of using mapping and data to help drive decision making. And we’re very good at that. But in the past we haven’t always been able to execute, to implement,” Fiegel said. “We were kind of a peer department without the authority of the county executive’s office to get things implemented.”
Her team now reports directly to Stenger, along with the budget division.
“Having strategy and budget both connected to direct reporting with the county executive’s office is really significant,” Fiegel said. “It’s a game changer.”
“We’ve been very strong on formulating strategy and we’ve been limited on executing strategy. And what’s the most important thing to do? To execute the strategy — to enhance quality of life in the county, to keep us as the job center… the place where the most educated, professional workforce in the region lives. That’s what we have at stake,” Fiegel added.
According to Stenger, St. Louis County might be the only county in the country to combine the exact mix of responsibilities under its head office, which he listed as “strategic planning, budget alignment, performance measurement and continuous improvement, data and policy analysis, and innovation.”
Fiegel said the over-arching strategy for the county is divided into four areas: people, places, opportunity, and a government that works in the best interest of those three categories.
She said her team is developing in-depth data-based initiatives that fall within those categories, with goals for each department slated to be in place by the end of the year.
“This is something that is a change for our organization, and as I’ve said to the county executive you can’t develop metrics until you know what your goals are, until you know where you’re going and what you want to achieve,” Fiegel said, adding that “Nothing is all canned at one time, so we’re a little further ahead in some areas than others.”
Next year she plans to put dashboards online listing those goals and how the county is doing in its efforts to meet them.
One initiative from the office is already at the implementation stage, however: the Age-friendly Community Action Plan designed to meet the needs of the county’s older residents.
“St. Louis County is the biggest, most populous jurisdiction in the state of Missouri. It also has the most baby boomers in the state of Missouri…and when we look at the data we absolutely said how could a county that has more than 40 percent of its population in the baby boomer age not prepare for the future,” Fiegel explained.
Stenger said the county should officially launch the age-friendly plan soon.
Follow Camille Phillips on Twitter: @cmpcamille.
