Prince William County Strategic Plan

Show Notes

In the latest episode of Shorter Topics, County Executive Chris Shorter sits down with Kaye Wallace-Sharp, Strategic Plan Coordinator, to explore the County’s 2025–2028 Strategic Plan — the resident-driven road map that guides nearly every major decision Prince William County makes.

Kaye shares how the plan was developed through robust community input and explains how it’s used to shape department priorities, drive budget decisions, and deliver real, measurable outcomes in areas like public safety, mobility, economic resilience and more.

Catch the latest episode and see how planning turns into progress.

What is Shorter Topics?

Hosted by Prince William County Executive Chris Shorter, The Shorter Topics vodcast is designed to provide quick yet insightful discussions on initiatives that directly impact the community. Each episode will feature in-depth conversations with content experts, county leaders and program managers who are revolutionizing the way services are delivered. With its tagline—Shorter Topics, Bigger Impacts—the vodcast aims to inform and engage residents by showcasing the incredible projects and people driving change in Prince William County Government.

Chris Shorter: 00:26

Hello. I am Chris Shorter, your county executive. Welcome back. For those of you who are joining us, this is our third episode. Very excited to have you join us.

Chris Shorter: 00:37

For those, who are listening on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. We appreciate you participating and listening in. Now I am excited today to have a conversation with our strategic plan coordinator, Ms. Kay Wallace. Kay, welcome.

Kaye Wallace: 00:58

Good morning. Yeah. Thanks for having

Chris Shorter: 01:00

me. Of course. Of course. Now, for those of you who are joining us for a second or third time, you know that the Shorter Topics podcast is really about making sure that we are highlighting phenomenal leaders, from around the county, who are doing absolutely amazing work. And today, we are, we are fortunate in that we get to have a really exciting conversation about strategic planning here in the county.

Chris Shorter: 01:26

And so, Kay, again, welcome. I'm really excited about this conversation. I'm excited to be able to talk about strategic planning. Now I'll say, certainly, you know this, but our audience may not because we have folks who are joining us from inside Prince William, but also who'll be, listening in from outside of the county. We do a lot in the way of planning and making sure that as a county, we are moving forward based on our community's goals.

Chris Shorter: 01:55

Now, whether it's our comprehensive plan, our futures report, which we did what, twenty years ago. Twenty years ago. Our strategic plan, our budget, we have a lot in the way of feedback around how we move forward. And so this is gonna be a really good conversation. We did a lot last year together.

Chris Shorter: 02:16

We did. And so look forward to sort of talking about it for the community. Now, I wanna start with though who you are and how you came into public service.

Kaye Wallace: 02:27

Well, thank you for that question. So, with regard to my educational background, I have a lot of degrees. I got a bachelor's from University of Virginia and a master's in public administration from George Mason.

Chris Shorter: 02:41

Also have Local. I like it. Absolutely.

Kaye Wallace: 02:43

I also have a Juris Doctorate or Law degree from Washington and Lee University School of Law.

Chris Shorter: 02:48

I did not know that. Yes.

Kaye Wallace: 02:51

J. Something new. And also, I'm certified in strategic planning from George Washington University.

Chris Shorter: 02:57

Okay. Now, why public service? Why public service?

Kaye Wallace: 03:01

Well, you know what? So, you might be surprised to know this because I look so young, but I've been in public service for about thirty years. And I first started

Chris Shorter: 03:12

out Wait, I think I may have known that you've been here for a good amount of time, but I didn't know thirty years. Congratulations.

Kaye Wallace: 03:20

Thirty years with regards to public service in general. I've been here with Prince William County for a little over six, almost seven years. But I started out as a probation officer, a juvenile probation officer. I've also worked in terms of my career as a juvenile magistrate. I've been a family mediator where I mediated custody visitation and child support cases for the Juvenile Domestic Relations Court.

Kaye Wallace: 03:45

I've also served as a project manager where I managed a county wide domestic violence project where we focused on bringing a coordinated community response to domestic violence. So, I eventually transitioned over to management and budget and became a fiscal manager before I transitioned to my current role as strategic plan coordinator.

Chris Shorter: 04:05

We have that in common. I started my local government career supporting young people. So in the deepest end of the juvenile justice system. You have, wow, what a journey, right? Absolutely.

Chris Shorter: 04:19

From young people to supporting families and then management and budget and now strategic Absolutely.

Kaye Wallace: 04:26

And I guess it could sound a little cliche, but I have always been interested in public service because I like helping people.

Chris Shorter: 04:33

Yes, indeed.

Kaye Wallace: 04:33

That is basically it. I've always wanted to help people.

Chris Shorter: 04:36

I think probably everyone tuned in or listening would identify with that who have chosen a career in public service. We wanna be helpful. Alright. So strategic plan. I think it'd be helpful to just give us some grounding in why we do a strategic plan here in Prince William County.

Chris Shorter: 04:59

Every, you know, and I've worked in a few municipalities. So have you, unfortunately, every place isn't able to do a strategic plan or a sort of four year look ahead in terms of visioning around what they want to do. We are fortunate in that we not only do it, but we take it very seriously. So, talk a little bit about sort of why we do strategic planning here in Prince William.

Kaye Wallace: 05:26

First of all, a strategic plan is a long term vision for your community. It is a document that would contain goals and priorities and metrics to determine success. The reason why we do it is because or why it matters is because a strategic plan can kind of serve as a North Star for your community to provide guidance on where you wanna go in the future and to help you make better decisions in order to reach wherever it is you say you want to go as far as a community or an organization.

Chris Shorter: 05:57

Yeah. We know that's important because there are a whole bunch of needs, obviously, in every community. But the ability to prioritize what's important and have the community give input there and eventually and especially our board is critically important. It helps with investment decisions. It helps with making sure that we are prioritizing for our own staff what they do.

Chris Shorter: 06:26

So, in terms of last year and the creation of this strategic plan, I guess talk a little bit about the journey we've been through over the last twelve months. Sure.

Kaye Wallace: 06:37

Yeah. So Prince William County refreshes or updates its strategic plan every four years. And we do what is called community based strategic planning. And so with regard to that process, what we do is we normally take about a year to develop our strategic plan. We were doing this last year, all of 2024.

Kaye Wallace: 06:56

And as you will recall, it was a very busy year. It was fun, but it was And we divided our process into five phases. But the most important phase of that process because we do community based strategic planning was the community engagement piece. So last year for about four months during the spring and summer, we had a robust community engagement process where we had all the supervisors host community town halls. We did resident focus groups with the community.

Kaye Wallace: 07:27

We also did focus groups with our business community, as well as the leaders of our cities and towns. And we did some online surveys, as well as interviews with you, Mr. Shorter, as the leader of our county, as well as the Board of Supervisors to get your perspectives on where we should go as a community for the next four That

Chris Shorter: 07:47

is a lot of stakeholders that you touched last year. How does that compare against how we have done it in years past?

Kaye Wallace: 07:56

That's a great question. So, can only speak to the last two iterations of our planning process here because I've been with the county for about a little over six years. But from what I understand, this process was the most inclusive process that we've ever done as a county, which I think is a great thing because we're all here together whether you are a resident of the county or an employee or both. But this time we used a much more robust process by making sure we made the effort to reach out to the community. Like I said, with the town halls, we did focus groups.

Kaye Wallace: 08:29

I'm not aware of the county having done focus groups before in the past, but we did this time. The board supervisors appointed a community advisory committee of residents this time and they did in previous years as well. And they were also instrumental in helping us to develop the plan. They helped us with the community outreach. And they also themselves as residents of our community who care about our community participated in a focus group and provided input as to what they felt like should be our priorities.

Chris Shorter: 08:57

No, I appreciate you mentioning then. This was residents who took out extra time in addition to the town halls where many residents came out to individual magisterial district town halls, they took extra time, met more often than They did. And they even came to the adoption. So, I think many of the community residents that participated came to the sort of final adoption where our board sort of took up the strategic plan. And you presented in such a phenomenal way the strategic plan and all of the strategic plan goals.

Chris Shorter: 09:35

I guess we it wouldn't have fit if we didn't mention the participation of the residents. So I appreciate you. I appreciate you mentioning it. Now, in terms of the adoption, I wonder if you could talk so we did all that work last year, and you said it, individual board members, they went to their communities, invited residents out. We went for the first time ever to staff and had, you know, sort of focus groups with staff And we pulled all that information together.

Chris Shorter: 10:08

And I guess what was next? What was next?

Kaye Wallace: 10:11

Well, what comes next is implementation of the plan. And with regard to that, what we're going to do this time is we're going to be much more intentional with how we actually execute our strategic plan. So, one of the things that I would want to share is that normally for local government strategic plans and I'm saying local meaning beyond not just Prince William County, what we tend to do as a community is we create these great plans. Then they tend to sit on a shelf and collect dust and we don't use them as much as we should. And so what we are doing as a county, we do use our strategic plan in the past and I can give you an example of how we do that with regard to the budget.

Kaye Wallace: 10:53

But what we intend to do this time is be much more intentional with how we implement and execute it. So we have formed teams of staff that will be cross collaborating and working together to make sure that we create work plans, action plans to say, this is how we're going to actually go about implementing this plan over the next four years.

Chris Shorter: 11:15

Now, I dropped in on one of the sessions just a few days ago where you were talking to many of the employees who will be actively involved in the strategic plan goal teams. And I have to say, Kaye, I am just am personally excited about what's to come. Often, we do these kinds of execution, implementation strategies, and it's almost as if we are presenting it to staff, where now we're saying to our teams, no, we want you actively involved in this process and to ultimately be in a position to present to our board and to our community what we are doing over the next few years. So I'm very excited about this. And you're absolutely right.

Chris Shorter: 12:06

This is not happening in a lot of communities where they not only do we go through such a sort of deliberate thoughtful process of developing a strategic plan, we get it adopted. And now we are doing we're putting just as much energy into implementation. So that is thanks a lot to you and your leadership. So I just want to appreciate you. Yeah.

Chris Shorter: 12:30

In terms of implementation, now that we have identified strategic plan goal teams made up of staff from across the county, we are working through KPIs. When do we present them to this community?

Kaye Wallace: 12:45

Right now, are scheduled to present our key performance indicators at the May 20 board work session. So, that session, at that meeting, we will show them and the community, the key performance indicators, and then also share a little bit with the board and the community our intentions with regard to the implementation process. So they'll get the opportunity to hear a little bit about our strategic goal teams that we are forming and what to expect in the future when those teams start to present to the board at future work sessions.

Chris Shorter: 13:14

Now, in terms of KPIs, now we talked a bit about KPIs with the board last year and the board's desire to see a more well thought out sort of KPI platform, if you will, and even KPIs themselves. Talk about what we're doing with KPIs this time around.

Kaye Wallace: 13:36

So, that's a great question. And one that's a little difficult to answer from the perspective of when it comes to measuring success with regard to a strategic plan or anything, there are different types of measures. You can have output measures or outcome measures. And outcome measures are a little more difficult to usually track and measure and see have you really been successful in whatever it is that you tried to do. What we are trying to do this iteration of our strategic plan is to, again, I'm going to use the word intentional.

Kaye Wallace: 14:07

We're trying to be much more intentional about the KPIs that we developed. So the county board adopted our most recent four year plan on February the twenty fifth of this year, a couple of months ago. It is the 2025 through 2028 strategic plan. That plan is yet another extensive and robust plan where we have eight goal areas. Those goal areas are education, environment, government, mobility, quality of life, safe and secure community, service delivery, and smart growth.

Chris Shorter: 14:41

You know, this was not meant to be a test, but if it were, you passed.

Kaye Wallace: 14:47

Thank you. And that was in alphabetical order. Was it? It is. But the reason why there's a reason for that too.

Kaye Wallace: 14:54

The reason why when the plan when you see it online, you will see that these goals are listed in alphabetical order. And it is not because we know that to some people, Smart Growth, for example, or the environment may be more important to them than the safe and secure community. But the fact of the matter is that all of these goals are important. And so what we decided is that because they are all equally important, instead of listing one goal before another to give the impression that we as a county are valuing one goal area over another, we decided, okay, let's just put them in alphabetical order because they are all equally important with regard to our quality of life.

Chris Shorter: 15:29

I so appreciate you making that point. And I'll double down on that point. I tell you when I got to Prince William County, two and a half or so years ago, I realized how important this community takes its strategic plan and restructured the government really based on the strategic plan goals. And so now by quadrant in our government, we are representing what the community said it wants to see in terms of the priorities of this this jurisdiction and of the of our county. So, you are absolutely right in terms of not wanting to prioritize one goal over the other.

Chris Shorter: 16:12

They are all important and we are we've heard loud and clear from this community and from our board sort of what they wanna see us working on over the next four years. Your your wildest dreams as it comes as it relates to strategic the strategic plan and things worked out perfectly over the next few years. What does this look like at the end of f y two '28? Well, not f y twenty eight, actually. They're based on calendar years.

Chris Shorter: 16:42

So at the end of twenty twenty eight, what have we done with the strategic plan?

Kaye Wallace: 16:49

Wildest dream would be that we as a county and a community, because this is our strategic plan together, not just Prince William County and the board's strategic plan to use as North Star, but also the community. And to me, if we are successful over the next four years, then most at least 80% of the things that are in our strategic plan will have been actually accomplished. Now keep in mind that strategic plans are long term vision documents. So most of the things that are in our plan cannot be accomplished in a short period of time. What we'll want to do and that's the part of the key performance indicators is that we'll want to establish measures to say, Okay, well, have we accomplished 25% of what we said we wanted to do over this first year or two?

Kaye Wallace: 17:36

And then by the time we get to the fourth year, we may not be finished with that goal yet, but we will continue on in the next iteration of our plan. So if we're successful over the next four years, then we will have accomplished a lot of things that are in the plan. We will have been able to look back and say based upon our measures that we were successful and be able to show that to the community. And then we will come together again and look at what we've done so far and say, what do we want to do next? Where do we want to go over the next four years to continue this process forward?

Chris Shorter: 18:04

Absolutely, and continue growing a beautiful community with a great quality of life. At the start of the conversation, we talked about all these other sort of guiding documents, comprehensive plan, futures report. Could you talk about how the strategic plan sort of helps us with our budget?

Kaye Wallace: 18:25

Absolutely. Yeah. And that is

Chris Shorter: 18:27

a very important You seemed excited about that.

Kaye Wallace: 18:29

That's an important piece because, of course, you know my love for management and budget. But with regard to Prince William County government, what we do is we use our strategic plan to help guide resource allocation and budget decisions. So every year, Prince William County develops its fiscal plan and the board adopts it usually in April of every year. We develop that plan by looking at our strategic plan and having all of our agencies look at what their needs are. And whenever an agency during our budget development process wants to submit a request for some funding for a new resource or a new program or service, the agency is required to tie that budget request to our strategic plan.

Kaye Wallace: 19:11

In procedure, what they're required to do is to be able to show how their budget request either advances our strategic plan or is tied to one of the strategic outcomes that helps to improve the community, whether it's improving public safety and expanding our transportation network or community health. Somehow have to tie the request to our strategic plan.

Chris Shorter: 19:35

I appreciate that. You could absolutely see how it almost multiplies the impact of the plan when you do it that way. I would also sort of ask you to kind of talk about the strategic goal teams and how they may ultimately be making direct requests, if you will, to the budget as well and how that might help.

Kaye Wallace: 19:59

With regard to our strategic goal teams, they'll come together and talk about the resources that are needed with regard to whatever program or services that we're looking to provide. And those teams, of course, will be collaborating with all of the department and agency directors. So this will not be done in a vacuum with just the goal teams coming up with these ideas. They will of course be collaborating with our agency directors as part of the budget process where we're having conversations and trying to figure out what the priorities should be. And then those priorities and those recommendations will then be brought to the executive cabinet to discuss and review and determine whether or not that should end up as a budget request.

Chris Shorter: 20:40

I love that. And sort of baked into the process, the sort of natural budget process. And I'll just sort of the strategic plan goal teams are all led by agency directors. Right? So this is certainly gonna be more of an organic process as we as we go.

Chris Shorter: 21:00

Now as we talk about the tie between the strategic plan and our budget, I just really wanna thank our board of county supervisors, thank the entire, team, especially our office of management and budget. The board just adopted our f y twenty six budget just a few days ago. And I just really I'm excited about what's to come. A lot of big, big investments in that budget. And so now we get to tie that to what we're going to do with a strategic plan.

Chris Shorter: 21:32

So very exciting weeks and months ahead.

Kaye Wallace: 21:36

The one thing that I would like to share is that, as I said before, with regard to strategic planning, it is a community endeavor. And so if you are a resident that would like to stay involved, one thing that I would say is to attend our board meetings, watch our board meetings if you can attend so that you can stay abreast and knowledgeable about what it is that we're working on as far as a community and the decisions that we're making as the county government serving your community. I would also direct people to our PWC Works page where they can find out information about our strategic plan and any initiatives and projects that we'll be working on going forward. And we also have a county strategic plan web page where you can find that information. You can find information about our current strategic plan.

Kaye Wallace: 22:23

You're going to be able to soon access a dashboard that has our KPIs so that you can track progress yourself. And the last thing I would like to say is that in four years, when we start on our next strategic plan, if you are a resident that would like to be involved, be on the lookout for the opportunity to either become a member of a community advisory committee or if the board supervisor hosts a town hall, attend that town hall and share information about what you would like to see as far as our community going forward.

Chris Shorter: 22:56

I so appreciate and appreciate that there are so many different ways that residents could be involved, whether it's PWC works, whether it's sort of going to our website or going to the, you know, sort of town halls, the KPIs, talking to the board about sort of our strategic plan implementation, there's a lot to come as it relates to strategic planning. So, you know, as we think about all of the time and energy that's gone into the development of the strategic plan, Kay, I I mean, big thank you to you for all of the work that you did but I think about all the community members, all the residents who came out, big thank you to them for their time. Now as we go forward, this is gonna be significant work, and work beyond for our staff, at least beyond the call of duty, if you will. So thank you in advance to them for over the next few years, all the work that they're gonna do in our strategic plan goal teams, presenting to the board, certainly presenting to me and the cabinet. A lot of work ahead.

Chris Shorter: 24:07

A lot of work. A lot of work ahead. So thank you to the staff, Prince William County staff who are gonna be we're all excited about, but who are gonna be working on the strategic plan goal teams. Okay. I wanna say thank you so much for the conversation, for visiting, for your phenomenal career, thirty years in very different roles that I could certainly relate to.

Chris Shorter: 24:32

So look forward to maybe even bringing you back. Right? Absolutely. After we get this thing started in earnest and maybe in a year or two talking a little bit about how the KPIs had manifested. And I just wanna say to everyone that joined us, thank you as always for joining us for shorter topics, bigger Impact.

Chris Shorter: 24:56

Thank you.