I reported previously that the hiring of Unicom-ARC, tax hike experts out of St. Louis, ought to put local taxpayers on TAX ALERT status.

I reproduce below McHenry County College President Walt Packard’s memo to the McHenry County College Board this week:

Timeline for Community Engagement and Strategic Planning Efforts

At the December Board meeting, the Board of Trustees approved the purchase of community engagement services over a period of 14 months from Unicom-ARC. The following is a high-level timeline of activities planned over the next 14 months leading to the adoption of a new Strategic Plan in April, 2010.

January, 2009

• Identification of potential Facilitating Team members

February, 2009

• Establishment of Facilitating Team
• Initial planning meetings of Facilitating Team

March, 2009 – August, 2009

• Host seven Community Engagement Sessions to:

o foster greater awareness within the community of the College’s programs and services
o present the Board’s Strategic Questions to the community
o solicit the community’s input and feedback on each of the Strategic Questions

• Host Town Hall meetings with MCC employees to:

o present an overview of Community Engagement Sessions
o solicit input and feedback on each of the Strategic Questions

September, 2009 – December, 2009

• Development of Strategic Plan utilizing:

o Board’s Strategic Questions
o input collected via Community Engagement Sessions and Town Hall meetings
o MCC’s AQIP Systems Portfolio
o MCC’s Key Performance Indicators

January, 2010 – March, 2010

• Host additional Community Engagement Sessions to:

o present MCC’s Strategic Plan
o solicit the community’s input and feedback on the Strategic Plan

• Present draft of Strategic Plan to Board of Trustees and employees for review
• Review and revise Strategic Plan based on input from Board of Trustees, community, and employees

April, 2010

• Present Strategic Plan to Board of Trustees for adoption

Walter J. Packard
President

To put this in perspective, take a look at this comment from Chris:

“In its District 300 “success story”, Unicom-Arc mentions that it helped set up FACE, the Facility Advisory Committee for Education.

“The way the description reads, FACE was an outreach program to convince people more thefterendums were needed.

“It would be interesting to fish through D-300s budgets when FACE was set up to see if D-300 paid anything to Unicom-Arc, i.e. to see if any taxpayer dollars were used to try to obtain more taxpayer dollars.”

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Click to enlarge Unicom-ARC’s bragging about its success in Carpentersville District 300.