Naperville Fast Tracks New Mission Statement

To no one’s surprise, Naperville city officials decided to update and fast track its Mission Statement to highlight inclusiveness and diversity as values. This was brought about by recent negative race related events by just a couple of misguided and uninformed individuals, but just enough to get officials scrambling to look more stately.

I fully anticipated the city council to take the current 28-word mission statement and turn it into a 248 word masterpiece. To my surprise the end result approved by the council was a mere 26 words. That’s a reduction over 7%. When do politicians reduce anything by 7%, unless it’s service of some kind.

Especially considering council member Judy Brodhead said, she “does words for a living”.

Who knew she was living in poverty? She has never seen a preposition at the end of a sentence that she doesn’t like, and dangling participles are her specialty.

The old Mission Statement read, “To provide services that ensure a high quality of life for our residents and a dynamic environment for our business community through collaboration, innovation, and sound fiscal management”.

Naperville’s new Mission Statement reads, “To provide services that ensure a high quality of life, sound fiscal management, and a dynamic business environment, while creating an inclusive community that values diversity.”

Gone are the powerful words, ‘for our residents’, along with ‘collaboration and innovation’, replaced with ‘creating an inclusive community that values diversity’.

Each of the nine city council members got something in the Mission Statement they wanted except for council  member Patty Gustin who wanted more words:

Here’s a run down of what each council member contributed to the new mission statement:

• John Krummen – fewer words from 28 to 26.
• Theresa Sullivan – ‘provide services’
• Paul Hinterlong – ‘ensure a high quality of life’
• Kevin Coyne – ‘sound fiscal management’
• Mayor Steve Chirico – ‘a dynamic business environment’
• Benny White – ‘creating an inclusive community that values diversity’
• Judy Brodhead – two prepositions, ‘to’ and ‘of’
• Pat Kelly – the period at the end of the sentence.

Naperville’s new Mission Statement is guaranteed to remain the same until another incident requires officials to again scramble to redo it to fit that environment, making Naperville’s Mission Statement only as good as the moment.