Jun 5, 2024 By Paul Paterra 2 min read

The city of Washington may be looking into updating its comprehensive plan.

Donn Henderson, city administrator, told council at its meeting Monday that contact has been made with the Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) concerning a new plan, since the current plan has not been updated in 12 years. Henderson said the city needs to go through DCED to get a grant to offset the updating costs, which could run about $100,000.

“We’ll be looking for matching funds from them,” Henderson said. “We’ll also be looking into seeing if we can get that match reduced and other ways to save some money for the taxpayers through the process.”

A comprehensive plan is a policy document that outlines a community’s vision for future growth and development and is a key tool for land use planning and local governance in Pennsylvania.

“It takes a look at all of your initiatives, all of the issues the city is facing and tries to come up with a comprehensive way of dealing with all of those issues that the city has,” Henderson said.

Henderson said the date to apply for funding is the end of June.

Henderson also suggested a study to determine a strategy to grow housing opportunities in the city.

“We’d like to maybe do a comprehensive study of the status of housing and what the city can be doing to improve the status of housing within the city borders,” Henderson said.

Henderson said the focus would be to grow home ownership.

“The more people that own homes, they have a vested interest and take more pride in the city,” he said. “That would be the ultimate goal, but also trying to improve the condition of existing housing, figure out how we can keep from letting the housing get any worse. Those kinds of issues would come about from a comprehensive look at housing.”