The Community Plan, produced by Brighton and Hove City Council and its partners, should be full of fireworks, producing sparkling ideas for the years ahead.
But the draft document, looking at the way forward during the next 20 years for the city, is little more than a damp squib.
Brighton and Hove has always thrived on innovation but there is precious little of that to be seen in the document.
Instead, all the tired old ideas are trotted out in a tired old format with plenty of words and precious little imagination.
Brighton and Hove is doing well as a cafe society but it has big problems. Really radical ideas are needed to tackle the housing problem that is threatening to damage the city.
The Community Plan should also be far bolder on taming traffic, which is threatening to bring Brighton and Hove to a halt within the next decade.
There are some good ideas buried in the plan, such as developing community schools in each neighbourhood and making much more use of Shoreham, which could become a regional airport.
Compilers of the Community Plan admit it is imperfect and needs much more work. That work needs to concentrate on making it an incisive set of ideas rather than an anodyne document that can be bound with red tape and shoved in a drawer to be forgotten.
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