GALVESTON — Almost three months after Hurricane Ike hit, the city has a committee ready to start work on a new vision for the community.

The city council unanimously agreed last month to appoint members of the comprehensive plan update committee to the new group, which will start meeting in early January.

Chairwoman Betty Massey this week started making the rounds of island business and community groups to explain the committee’s goals, the first of which is to take advantage of what she describes as a “do over.”

“This city better look different than it did on Sept. 11 when this is all done,” she said. “If not, we’re not taking advantage of this opportunity.”

Massey worked with a group of 35 volunteers for almost a year before the storm to update the comprehensive plan, a document that is supposed to guide the decisions that shape the city’s future.

But Ike changed almost all of the base assumptions for their work when it came ashore Sept. 13, flooding 75 percent of the island’s homes, almost drowning downtown and knocking the University of Texas Medical Branch to its knees.

The group will spend the next six months figuring out what island residents want their community to look like, Massey said. It will focus on specific projects that meet the community’s goals so local leaders can ask for funds to start the rebuilding.

Representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency will work with the committee throughout the process.

Massey said she realized many already had started meeting to talk about the island’s future. The new committee will be a coordinating vehicle for what’s already happening at a grass roots level, she said.

After Hurricane Katrina, the federal agency worked with Louisiana residents on a community recovery plan that included transportation, health care, housing and economic development projects.

The island’s committee will look at many of the same kinds of issues.

The group will be broken down into subcommittees that will focus on communication, housing, education, economic development, historic preservation, cultural resources and transportation, Massey said. Smaller focus groups might also take a more in-depth look at challenges like downsizing at the medical branch and the prospect of adopting casino gambling as a way to boost the island’s recovery, she said.

The committee’s first task will be to schedule several town hall meetings to engage Galvestonians in a conversation about their future, Massey said.

Once the group has a handle on the community’s vision, it will create a list of projects that will help meet those goals. Massey said she hoped to have the recovery plan finished by the end of June.

Massey is the second person to lead a recovery committee. Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas established another committee and appointed island businessman Gerald Sullivan as its chairman sometime after the storm. But the rest of the city council was unaware of Sullivan’s work, and Thomas disbanded the committee last month after she was criticized for overstepping her authority in setting it up.