Skagit County officials on Oct. 21 told the Board of County Commissioners they have translated the county's 2022 strategic plan into a balanced-scorecard model in the ClearPoint software and will begin publishing a public-facing site in early 2026.

County deputy administrator Jennifer Johnson introduced the update and said the county converted the plan into ClearPoint to present initiatives, targets and measures in a single, data-driven platform. Communications manager Jen Rogers told commissioners ClearPoint templates and narrative for each key focus area (KFA) will be ready for public pages in January and the county hopes to launch the external site in February 2026.

County leaders said the internal ClearPoint rollout is already underway. Human resources and risk staff presented three staff-driven initiatives that are being tracked in ClearPoint: an employee satisfaction survey, alternative work arrangements, and improvements to performance evaluations and training.

The employee survey is a draft of roughly 60 questions across about a dozen categories, including overall satisfaction, intent to stay, workload/stress, management effectiveness, communication and psychological safety. Assistant HR director Donnie LaPlante told commissioners the KFA 1 work group will finalize questions, the county will seek department-head and commissioner feedback for about three weeks, and the target date to roll out the survey to employees is Dec. 1, 2025. LaPlante said the county plans to use the survey annually to measure trends over time.

On alternative work arrangements, staff said they distributed an application and instructions in September and asked employees to submit requests by Dec. 1; managers will report back to the board on levels and types of participation after that deadline. For performance evaluations, staff said a new technology stack (NeoGov/Perform plus LEARN) deployed earlier this year has increased the share of employees with documented evaluations (roughly 20% so far in 2025 versus just under 13% in all of 2024). HR will provide snapshot reports to commissioners showing each department's evaluation progress.

Facilities director Ken Hansen and other KFA leads flagged several implementation issues tied to ClearPoint display conventions. Hansen said ClearPoint's default color thresholds mark a measure "green" only at 100% of target, with 80% to 99.99% recorded as "fair/yellow." He warned that public viewers could misread a chart that shows mostly "green" now but projects deterioration later unless the initiatives and timeline are clearly explained. Hansen also recommended adding legends for initiative timelines and clarifying whether measures show future projections or only current status.

Commissioners and staff also discussed the line between internal and public-facing content. Rogers said the public pages will include a letter from the commissioners, context for each KFA, short explanations of why measures matter and a link to the underlying data. The county's old website will host the ClearPoint pages at launch; they will be migrated into the county's new website once it is available.

Why this matters: Commissioners said they intend ClearPoint to be a transparent tool for both internal management and public accountability. Several elected officials said they want shared public understanding of priorities before budget choices arrive in the 2026 cycle.

Commissioners asked staff to standardize color thresholds across KFAs, make initiative timelines and funding status clearer, and return with a follow-up briefing in late October on how ClearPoint displays infrastructure and critical-technology measures.