City of Arvada Mission, Vision and Values
Vision: We Dream Big and Deliver
Mission: We are dedicated to delivering superior services to enhance the lives of everyone in our community.
Values: Innovation - We excel in creativity, flexibility and the use of best practices while valuing diverse backgrounds, ideas and perspective.
Passion - We are a high performing, inclusive team inspiring each other to pursue excellence.
Opportunity - We value our diversity, embrace possibilities, face challenges, persevere and take action to deliver quality results.
The City employs more than 700 full time employees and 300 temporary/seasonal employees. Together, we provide essential services to residents through our municipal court, community and economic development, parks, golf, hospitality, housing, police, public works, and utilities departments. Several internal support service departments including human resources, finance, legal, and information technology assist in accomplishing the City’s mission. Our organization is not only a great place to work; our employees are dedicated to making Arvada a great place to live.
Our Organizational Awards
The City of Arvada dedicates itself to performance excellence and has been recognized for customer focused excellence, societal responsibility, performance management, and visionary leadership.
- Arvada’s continuing journey to excellence has been recognized by the Rocky Mountain Performance Excellence Institute with both the “Foothills” and the “Timberline” performance awards.
- Our finance department has received the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award from the Government Finance Officers Association for 38 years.
- The Arvada Police Department has been setting the standard for excellence since 1945 and has been named a flagship agency by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.
- The City has also been recognized as a Top Workplace by the Denver Post.
- The Top Workplace designation is based on a comprehensive employee survey that provides feedback on employee engagement and satisfaction. We have participated in the survey every three years since 2012 and been recognized each time, most recently in 2021.
Our Organizational Culture
The culture of an organization can be related to the human body’s DNA. Culture determines how everything else in the organization operates, reflecting deeply held values and beliefs. In 2016, the City embarked on a process to re-define and improve our organizational culture. Some 80 employees at all levels of the organization participated in this process, drafting our Vision, Mission, and Values Statements that define both who we are and what we want to be. The City of Arvada’s Organizational Development initiative is a deliberately planned, organization-wide effort to become a high-performing, results-oriented, and customer-focused organization.
This is our journey to becoming excellent and be among the “Best of the Best.”