TROY – The city’s draft comprehensive plan's call for a 1 percent annual population and job growth when long-range forecasts predict no influx of new residents has left some city officials questioning the proposal.

Troy's population is projected to remain at about 50,000 through 2050, according to Capital District Regional Planning Commission. The "Realize Troy Comprehensive Plan" envisions 10 percent growth in a single decade.

"The 1 percent growth is going to be by definition difficult to achieve," Republican City Council President Carmella Mantello said.

But instead of casting the plan aside, officials want to extract what's workable to help build on recent successes in redevelopment of old factories into apartments and small software companies taking root.

The plan uses changes in the city during the last five to 10 years as a starting point. It emphasizes that Troy has made progress despite not having a new comprehensive plan since 1962.

"To effectively sustain this momentum and reverse the effects of long-term population decline, a bold new vision, growth strategy and development framework are needed to guide growth, change and transformation of the city over the next 25 years," Realize Troy states.

The plan calls for spurring development downtown, in South Troy, Lansingburgh and North Central. It also calls for improvements in the city's neighborhoods and to encourage development that enhances and makes them more livable.

But the plan never addresses the redevelopment of the former City Hall site at 1 Monument Square, which the city has viewed as a downtown anchor, instead depicting it as parkland. It calls for ripping out Dinosaur-Bar-B-Que and the Best Western Hotel at Franklin Plaza for redevelopment.

"Pie in the sky" and "disappointing" was how Mantello described the plan.

She has been critical of the $1 million paid for the plan to be done by Urban Strategies Inc. of Toronto, which doesn't know the city as well as a local planning firm. She said it didn't deal with the neighborhoods until city Planning and Community Development Commissioner Steven Strichman rewrote it.

“Development has been focused for too long on housing. At some point we need to focus on building jobs as well,” said Democratic Councilman Anasha Cummings, a member of the Council’s Planning Committee.

Cummings said 500 units of new construction are under development and that the plan has proposals for the creation of 2,600 new manufacturing and hi-tech jobs in South Troy. He said plans for the neighborhoods should be further developed.

Cummings said the plan has strong points that could be leveraged to obtain grant money, but agreed that much of it would never occur. He said the plan gives Troy something to present to developers and state agencies to show how the city can leverage its assets to expand and renew itself.

For a community that's dealt with fiscal difficulties since the 1990s when the state bailed it out of budgeting problems, the costs of delivering what the plan envisions could be deceptive for residents.

"The question is who's going to pay for it. Ultimately, I fear we are giving residents false hope," said Councilman Mark McGrath, a Conservative who serves on the Planning Committee.

Troy has 26,500 jobs, according to the draft comprehensive plan. The U.S. Census Bureau’s estimates of where the city's 22,027 employed residents commute to work reports that about 37 percent or 8,150 work in the city.

The proposed comprehensive plan goes to the city Planning Commission for review at 6 p.m. Wednesday and to the council Planning Committee to discuss at 6 p.m. Thursday.