The City of Williamsport will get a technical assistance planner from the state Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED), embedded at no cost, ahead of the preparation of a citywide comprehensive plan.

Council passed a resolution approving a letter of understanding between the city and DCED but first heard from Mayor Derek Slaughter who introduced Rachael Hobbs, Local Government Planning Specialist with DCED, who will lead this program and service for Williamsport.

“We are very, very fortunate — as you all know we have a lot of moving parts and any free assistance that the state would like to provide to us we are pleased to receive,” Slaughter said.

Hobbs, who covers the northeast region of Pennsylvania, which includes Williamsport, said the management team at the department came up with a new program that it wanted to become a kind of pilot program – a community technical assistance program.

The program gives up to 400 hours to a community that the department thinks could benefit from it.

“We were tasked with finding a community,” Hobbs said, adding she did this by having a conversation with Jonas Crass, also a local government specialist with DCED, who has assisted Williamsport on questions and issues related to the current strategic management planning process and discussed Home Rule charter aspects with the city officials and public at a town hall meeting and various council meetings.

Crass recommended Williamsport to Hobbs and after looking at some of the city’s most pressing issues, the DCED team decided the city was an excellent candidate for the program — as there are many projects under way or at the helm to boost the economy, she noted.

Moreover, the city has an existing community and economic development and planning office and so Hobbs said she had initial conversations with those individuals.

There is a proposal to create a citywide comprehensive plan.

“This would be the step before that,” Hobbs said. “We would do a lot of pre-planning strategies,” she said.

A steering committee may evolve out of this to focus on a citywide vision.

“It can be anything you want it to be,” Hobbs said, adding that should be done before starting the citywide comprehensive plan.

“We feel like pre-planning assistance is effective, it is efficient — it is what we can do with limited resources,” she said.

In the future, if the city does a citywide comprehensive plan there is additional assistance available.

As this process begins and concludes in the August-September timeframe, there may be support planners that the city officials might see or hear from who can help out if there is a steering committee formed, she said.