Pending a vote by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen in the near future, the City of Vicksburg will have a new guide for developing its future.

The city’s Planning Commission Tuesday recommended the board approve the comprehensive plan for the city — a 227-page plan expected to guide the city’s growth and development for the next 25 years.

Comprehensive plans for cities are not a new phenomenon. Like police and fire departments and streets and sewer systems, every city has one. Some cities have put their plans to good use while others have let theirs sit on a shelf and collect dust. The question for Vicksburg is what will our city fathers do with this new guide. Will they try and implement some of the recommendations? Or will they let it sit somewhere in a dark corner and gather dust?

Mayor George Flaggs Jr. has said he wants to develop Vicksburg into a tourist destination and has expressed a desire to make the city a technology destination with the U.S. Army Engineering Research and Development Center as the hub, and there are several sections in the new plan that can help the city become what the mayor wants.

But the immediate question is how to apply some of the plan’s recommendations to a city with aging infrastructure and a down but slowly improving downtown. How do we take the recommendations and begin moving the city toward the future.

While many of the recommendations such as gateways, open areas and multiple bicycle and walking trails are good ideas, they are ideas for the future 10, 15, maybe 20 years down the line. Others, like the neighborhood concept, which divides the city into 12 distinct, neighborhoods, and new zoning regulations are something that can begin now and can have an immediate impact.

The neighborhood concept gives areas of town an identity and can help preserve certain characteristics that are unique to the city and make it tourist-friendly. A good candidate is the downtown district, which is quickly becoming a preferred residential area that is slowly attracting businesses. One example cited in the plan is the development of the farmers’ market lot at the corner of Washington and Jackson streets as a location for events other than the popular summer and fall markets.

That development my soon become reality. Flaggs has included money for a multipurpose pavilion in the city’s budget that will house the farmers’ market and serve as a venue for other events.

New zoning regulations may have the biggest impact, because the city’s current code is out of date and not realistic when it comes to the city’s neighborhoods. Community Development Director Victor Gray-Lewis has told the planning commission a new code will be presented later this year.

One of the city’s problems involves its inventory of abandoned homes, and the board has at times discussed finding ways to get those homes that meet certain criteria rebuilt or repaired and made habitable again. Warren County’s Habitat for Humanity has done a good job acquiring existing homes and renovating them for families.

But because some of these homes were built on small lots in earlier decades when there were more lenient or no codes, plans by people to refurbish or even rebuild are stopped because the codes restrict what they can build. That can stifle the regeneration of a neighborhood. A new, more realistic code could address some of those problems, making it easier to rebuild and restore rundown neighborhoods.

It will now be up to the Board of Mayor and Aldermen to approve or reject the new comprehensive plan. If they approve it, and it appears the board will, they will have a guide to move the city forward and attract visitors and new development. The real test will be how and when they use it, and whether they will use the more common sense recommendations in the plan to begin making an immediate impact.