City officials have been excited about the development of a new, project-driven comprehensive plan for several months.

A timeline for that process is now coming into view.

The City of Warren Planning Commission met on Wednesday morning to review the RFP (request for proposals) document that will be advertised and sent to several consulting firms directly.

Staff proposed interviews of the firms for the week of April 12 but Commission chair Don Nelson suggested bumping that up a week.

That, he said, “give us a little more time to digest” the material before a special meeting proposed for April 14. The Commission’s consultant recommendation would then make it to council’s April meeting as well.

“I don’t want to delay it,” Nelson said.

Commission member Mike Suppa said that amid the presentations “a lot of times… you kind of know” who the best option is. “But other times you don’t.”

He spoke in favor of bumping up the interviews to “give us a few days to pull together thoughts and discuss among each other.”

City Manager Nancy Freenock said the RFP gives the selected firm 18 months to complete the plan and she asked if the Commission wants to add language requiring six and 12 month updates.

“It’s a good thought,” Nelson said.

“By 12 months, we better see a pretty solid draft of the plan,” Freenock said, noting that the six month report would be more of a “status update” on what areas have been addressed.

“A lot of their work is already done,” she said, “because of the downtown strategic plan” from 2017.

She cautioned that any kind of timeline should be included in the RFP as it would be binding and the Commission concurred with that recommendation.

Nelson reiterated the importance of not letting the plan collect dust once completed.

“This onus is on us” to follow up, he said. “(We) need to bake into our process a review of the comprehensive plan so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.”