A little more than three years after a kickoff meeting in December 2018, a draft of Rehoboth Beach’s 2020 Comprehensive Development Plan is ready for public inspection.

Planning commissioners, city commissioners and city officials conducted a joint meeting Dec. 15 to go over the second draft of the document. According to consultant Lauren Goode, project manager for city consultant Wallace Montgomery, the third draft of the city’s 2020 CDP will be available on the city’s website beginning Tuesday, Dec. 21. Public comments on this draft will be accepted until Thursday, Jan. 13.

For various reasons – planning commission turnover; COVID; a number of high-profile, time-consuming project submissions; the exit of the city’s first consultant – city officials have asked for and received two year-long extensions from the state to complete the state-mandated document that will guide the city’s development for the next decade. Rehoboth has a hard deadline of July 2022 to complete the CDP. If it’s not completed in time, the state has the ability to withhold funding it provides the city for various projects.

The city’s first consultant, KCI, announced it would not be seeing the project through to completion this fall. Since then, the planning commission has been working in earnest to meet the deadline.

Planning Commission Chair Michael Bryan said the draft being sent to the state needs to be submitted to the state for Preliminary Land Use Service review by Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2022. The deadline for written public feedback has been set for Thursday, Jan. 13 to ensure that public comments can be included in that draft, he said in an email Dec. 19.

“The city is working within a compressed time frame in order to ensure that the CDP can be completed, adopted, and submitted to the state by July,” said Bryan.

The state’s PLUS review is expected to take about 60 days, said Bryan. ​Additional public comments will be accepted at public hearings in the spring, he said.

To date, the first two drafts of the plan have not been made available for public review. However, comments from the planning commission, City Planner Tom West, city commissioners and other groups in response to the first two drafts of the CDP are available to the public on the Rehoboth Beach civicweb portal, in the 2020 Comprehensive Development Plan folder under the document tab at the top of the website.

At this point, it’s still unclear how the 2020 CDP will differ from the 2010 CDP. The city declined to comment on what changes the public should expect to see.

“As the plan is still a work in progress and final decisions/consensus have not yet been reached, we'd rather not comment at this point on what specific changes might be,” said Bryan.

The release of the draft doesn’t mean the end of the planning commissioners’ work. They have a special planning meeting scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 5; another joint meeting with city commissioners Friday, Jan. 14; and another special meeting Thursday, Jan. 20.