by Gary Nelson - Aug. 28, 2012 10:32 PM The Republic | azcentral.com

The last time Mesa embarked on a large-scale civic-planning effort, light rail was just a glimmer in some futurist's eye. The Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport was a struggling former air base. And the city's northwest corner was a vast swath of farm fields.

Now it's time to make another run at a long-term plan for the state's third-largest city, and Mesa wants to give every resident a chance to buy into the vision.

City officials hope that much of the input will happen via the online infrastructure the city already established for its iMesa community-visioning program, which helped shape the $70 million park bond issue that city voters will consider in November.

John Wesley, Mesa's planning director, told the City Council this week that state law requires a General Plan update every 10 years. That was pushed back a couple of years when the Legislature, in a bow to the financial problems that cities faced during the recession, extended the deadline.

So Mesa is just cranking up a process that in normal times would be nearly finished. The upside is that the ideas for what Mesa will look like in the future will extend to 2040.

That quarter-century-plus is likely to bring vast changes, just as in 2002 when few could foresee the transformation that light rail would bring to Mesa's downtown or the emergence of Gateway as a booming passenger hub or the ongoing makeover of Mesa's northwest corner into a shopping and sports mecca.

Those occurrences have required some legal tweaking of what Mesa laid out in its 2002 General Plan, and whatever is crafted in the next go-around also will have to change over time.

But the goal is for the citizens of 2012 to lay out some ideas that today's newborns will inherit by the time they're starting families of their own.

Wesley said the idea this time is to update what was done in 2002, rather than write a whole new plan from scratch.

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Mesa residents can help shape future of city