PROVIDENCE — The City Council has recommended modifying the Comprehensive Plan to insert some short-term protections for the industrial waterfront businesses along Allens Avenue and the waterfront sections at Fox Point, and to put a greater focus on the ongoing neighborhood planning process.

The protections include barring residential development from the Allens Avenue industrial corridor until the city completes its detailed “neighborhood charette” for the area, and including language that makes it clear the document is incomplete until the neighborhood planning process is finished.

It remains to be seen how many of the council’s changes come to pass unaltered. Planning Director Thomas E. Deller described the process as one of compromise, and said that he and council planning advisor Ernest Hutton will sit down over the next week and hammer out the exact nature of the changes.

But in whatever form, the changes are certainly a nod to the industrial interests on Allens Avenue that have lobbied hard against the change of zoning from purely industrial to mixed-use, which would allow residential and commercial development.

The changes proposed by Hutton and backed by the council’s Ordinance Committee last night would restrict development to “jobs-only” on the waterfront areas until the results of specific neighborhood planning sessions are complete.

“It’s a small step in the right direction,” said Andrew M. Teitz, a lawyer speaking for the coalition of waterfront businesses that have united against the change.

Much of the controversy surrounding the comprehensive plan has come from the format of the approval process.

The process is structured in stages: this fall, the city intends to approve an interim Comprehensive Plan that would make major changes to the city’s overarching planning goals, and then each neighborhood would be examined in detail over the next two years. When the neighborhood reviews are completed in 2009, the city would revise the Comprehensive Plan, and make zoning changes in the individual neighborhoods.

Council members have worried that the neighborhoods will get short shrift if the majority of the document is approved now and amended later.

To address that, Hutton recommended that a number of qualifiers be added to the plan that, among other measures, would make any major zoning and planning changes enacted over the next few years temporary, contingent on their compliance with the results of the neighborhood planning processes.

Some council members have argued that the city doesn’t need to submit the plan in stages at all, and can wait for the neighborhood planning process to conclude. Councilman John J. Lombardi said last night that the city does not need to rush things, as the current plan should still function legally and govern local development even though it has expired.

“To go forward as we are, it may just be unwarranted and inappropriate,” Lombardi said.

Kevin Flynn, the state’s top planning authority, said in an interview yesterday that the laws are very vague when it comes to the consequences of allowing the Comprehensive Plan to expire.

“The statute doesn’t give a prescriptive list of what happens when your five years is up. It doesn’t say.”

But realistically, there are no immediate negative repercussions if Providence runs past the plan’s expiration date.

“It’s not like they’re going to lose aid to education or anything like that, no,” he said.

The existing plan will continue to govern local development even after it has expired, Flynn said.

“It still guides your local action,” he said. “There are several communities that have gone well past that five years.”

The gray area concerns development projects proposed by state agencies, which may not be bound by an expired plan. There is some concern that a state agency might want to undertake a project within city limits that would be opposed by the city, and without a Comprehensive Plan in place, the city might not be able to fight it as effectively.

“The state may not feel bound by consistency with your plan,” he said. But Flynn stressed that there are no state projects of that sort on the horizon.

In theory, the law provides only one possible consequence if a city doesn’t submit a plan on time: the state will write a plan for you.

Flynn said that as a practical matter, this is not something Providence needs to worry about — the state doesn’t have the staff to do that if it wanted to.

Flynn also said that the state would not have signed off on a stopgap measure the city’s Planning Department tried to implement in the spring to deal with the expiration issue.

With the plan set to expire in May, the Planning Department intended to resubmit the existing Comprehensive Plan as a placeholder, until the new plan could be submitted for review.

It came out two weeks ago that Providence had never actually resubmitted the plan, which Deller said was due to an internal error in the Planning Department. Flynn said that it’s just as well — the tactic would not have held water.

“Obviously, if we had received that, we would have said it was the same plan,” Flynn said, adding that there is no precedent for such an action, and no reason to think it would be approved.

“No one has ever done that. No one has ever even tried to do that,” he said.

Flynn also noted that he was very impressed by the efforts of Planning Department to solicit public comment and promote public involvement in the process.

“I think the city is to be commended,” he said. “The charette process they’ve done for this plan is more extensive than for anything I’ve seen… I haven’t seen a community do that.”

dbarbari@projo.com