photo by: Emma Delk

Moundsville Planning Commission Chairperson Josephine Mentzer discusses a draft of the city’s new comprehensive plan during an Oct. 23 meeting.

MOUNDSVILLE — The Moundsville Planning Commission has sent its approved draft of the city’s 2024 comprehensive plan to the Moundsville Policy Subcommittee for approval at their next meeting.

Planning Commission Chairperson Josephine Mentzer said the 2024 comprehensive plan was formed by revising the city’s 2014 comprehensive plan. The commission kept the plan’s structure of four main chapters and used the 2014 plan’s background information and the prior plan’s identified needs and interventions for the city.

The plan’s revisions were primarily made in Chapter Three, where new areas of concern for the city are identified, and Chapter Four, where new goals are devised to address these areas of concern.

Chapter Three of the 2014 comprehensive plan serves as the city’s “Needs Assessment.” The six main areas of concern identified were land use, housing, economic development, transportation and infrastructure, the natural gas industry and recreational amenities.

Chapter Four of the 2014 comprehensive plan includes an “Action Plan” to address the city’s needs. The plan included six goals for the city to address the areas of concern, including increasing recreational amenities and properly planning for the natural gas industry.

Mentzer said the planning commission identified a problem with the 2014 plan, noting that it contained “so many goals and objectives” that the city could not meet all of them. She said the revision to the 2014 plan focused on narrowing down the objectives the 2024 plan would target.

Feedback for revisions to the 2014 plan was collected from an online public survey and in-person feedback during two public forums regarding the formation of the 2024 plan.

Based on community feedback, Mentzer said they identified “three main areas of concern” for the city to address in the plan: economic and financial development, housing and infrastructure.

Mentzer said that the feedback collected from the community, which formed the three main goals based on the identified areas of concern, “reflects the city’s mission of providing a safe and beneficial community for all community members.”

Chapter Four of the 2024 comprehensive plan draft contains three main goals for each area of concern. According to Mentzer, each goal has two objectives with action steps to “benchmark progress” toward achieving it.

Mentzer said another revision from the 2014 plan for the 2024 comprehensive plan draft is the inclusion of specific stakeholders inside action steps, which allows planning commission members to “better track progress or lack thereof towards the main goals.”

“The 2014 comprehensive plan lacked the delineation for identifying stakeholders,” Mentzer said. “It just said that city stakeholders would be held accountable, but it didn’t list those people. That’s a step we took to do.”

Stakeholders include city council members and members of city boards and commissions.

“With economic and financial development, one of the main stakeholders are the city council members and the city manager,” Mentzer said. “When looking at infrastructure, the stakeholders are various city department heads, the water board and the sanitary board/stormwater board.”

Mentzer said the revision also includes an added calendar of meetings and steps the planning commission can take to monitor stakeholders’ progress on action steps to “lead to successful objects and eventually accomplished goals.”

Mentzer said the planning commission hopes the city can accomplish all three goals and that the community can see progress on those steps before the plan is revised again in 2033.

The city policy committee will receive the approved draft during its meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 10. If the subcommittee approves it, the draft will be sent to the city council for its first reading during its next meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 17.

Metzer noted the policy subcommittee could also send the draft back to the commission with recommended changes for the planning commission to discuss in January.