Page 16 - CityofSouthlakeFY27Budget

TABLE OF CONTENTS

GOAL: STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT AND HIGH-QUALITY SERVICE
DELIVERY

Our first goal is to ensure that every dollar in the FY 2027 budget advances the City Council’s strategic
priorities and supports exceptional service delivery. Figure 1, the City of Southlake Strategy Map, remains
our compass: clarifying focus areas, objectives, and values that guide daily operations.

Consistent with prior years, this budget sustains high-value programs across all four Focus Areas (Safety
& Security, Infrastructure & Development, Partnerships & Volunteerism, and Performance Management
& Service Delivery) without reducing any service levels. These investments allow us to refine existing
services, incorporate best practices, and pursue efficiency gains while maintaining the award-winning,
Budget Overview
accredited standards our residents and businesses expect.

This alignment is deliberate rather than assumed. Through the Strategic Management System, the City
Council has established the strategy that guides daily operations, and it has taken the further step of
adopting a set of financial guiding principles that govern how resources are managed in service of that
strategy. Those principles, among them strategic alignment, disciplined and managed growth, and a
commitment to maintaining service levels, were most recently reviewed with Council at the summer
strategic priorities workshop. Working within that framework, the FY 2027 budget evaluates every
request against the Council’s adopted focus areas, protects the accredited service levels residents
depend on, and pursues efficiency to balance with both available revenue and service expectations. In
this way, the budget presented here is a direct expression of the strategy and principles the Council has
set.

Across all four focus areas, the FY 2027 budget funds a concrete agenda of work residents will see and
feel. In Safety & Security, the City will bring its new public safety training tower into full operational use,
modernize police technology, and maintain the accreditations that place Southlake among the best-
protected communities in the state. In Infrastructure & Development, it will open the new Municipal
Service Center without interrupting resident services, adopt an updated Parks, Recreation and Open
Space Master Plan and reinvest in existing parks, begin a multi-year water meter replacement, and
modernize the City’s development standards, including those governing storm water and land use. In
Partnerships & Volunteerism, the City will work with residents, stakeholders, and community partners to
shape a vision and concept plan for a new park on the recently acquired Old Dragon Stadium property,
alongside the signature events and volunteer programs that bring the community together. And in
Performance Management & Service Delivery, it will expand online and digital services, from online
development applications to a refreshed economic development website, strengthen how the City
resolves the issues residents raise, and engage in the 2027 Texas legislative session, tracking and helping
shape legislation that affects the City and preparing to implement new requirements as they take effect.

That agenda, and the everyday services behind it, reaches residents at a remarkably modest cost. What
that supports, area by area, consistently exceeds the baseline of typical municipal operations.

Emergency response that saves lives. For about $71 a month, Southlake’s Fire and EMS service staffs
a paramedic on every fire apparatus and delivers Advanced Life Support in about six minutes, in a state
that requires paramedics only on ambulances. That capability changes outcomes: the department’s

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