If you live in the Al Ritchie community, you are being asked to give your input on the future of the neighbourhood.

The City of Regina is working on a new neighbourhood plan and will be hosting a come and go session at the Core Ritchie Neighbourhood Centre Thursday night.

City’s Fred Searle says residents will get a chance to gather information and most importantly give their feedback in terms of how they see their community. “Because they live in it, they know it well and they know about their community. We are looking at getting ideas from them in terms of how they see their community developing, where they see that going in the future and some ideas around those unique characteristics in there neighbourhood that they would like to see going forward.”

Searle says community feedback is important because everything gathered on things like development, different amenities and overall design characteristics will go into developing the plan. “We very much see this as an opportunity to work closely with the community in partnership to see how the community grows and develops. All that information and engagement is important and certainly moving forward that will be an important piece to report back to council and to our planning commission as we bring forward a new plan.”

He adds that the planning process is important and will take about one year to complete. “Because we do have the engagement piece with the community, which is very important, so we are having this first ideas fair with the community and then once we get that feedback we will be coming back to the community again. We are looking at that process to run about one year.”

He says the city hopes to do three to four plans per year in order to get all 31 plans done within seven to eight years.

Thursday’s session will run from 5:30pm to 8:00pm.