The draft of a strategic plan to establish an overall vision for downtown that had been anticipated to be made public soon has been pushed back by at least a month or so.

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In his report to commissioners during the Redevelopment Agency meeting on Wednesday night, Executive Director Robert Landolfi said the original timeline anticipated for this month has been delayed by about a month.

“We’ve gone some through review meetings and hoped to have the document this month; now it looks like sometime next month,” Landolfi said. There probably will be some changes to redevelopment plans, which would require amendments to certain ordinances by City Council, he said. The Redevelopment Agency won’t have to act on those changes but should be aware of them, according to Landolfi. He suggested that the strategic vision plan probably will be later than the original timeline by about a month.

At the October Redevelopment Agency meeting, Landolfi briefed commissioners that meetings had been scheduled to discuss the draft version of the plan, with limited distribution until it is finalized, at which point it would be made public.

City Council awarded a $63,000 contract in June to Red Bank-based consultants Heyer, Gruel & Associates (HGA) for development of a downtown strategic visioning plan. Part of the process included a survey of stakeholders about the present and future of downtown that closed in September.

The plan, as described in a May memo from Heyer Gruel, aims to “create a proactive document used to attract sustainable economic development and serve as a roadmap to facilitate the sustainable growth of the city into the future.”

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