The Horizon Plan is not just getting a facelift. It’s receiving a full-body makeover courtesy of Oregon developer John Fregonese and a team of local and national experts. Among the elements they will be addressing: Transportation, land use, urban planning and environmental protection.
Fregonese says the first few months will be spent collecting and analyzing data on East Baton Rouge Parish. In January, the team will launch input sessions that will allow citizens to talk about their priorities for a comprehensive plan and even create their own maps of what such a plan should look like.
“It’s very interactive,” Fregonese says. “It’s an opportunity for residents to give us their feedback and to let us know what their priorities are.”
Such public workshops are a strategy that has served Fregonese well, drawing several thousand people throughout the process.
“My sense is that the community is very excited about this comprehensive plan,” says Rannah Gray, owner/partner of Marmillion/Gray Media, the communications firm slated to lead public outreach efforts. “John is looking for public input, and he has ways of doing that.”
Fregonese hopes to have a first draft completed in June 2010 and a finished plan ready to present to the Zoning Commission and Metro Council in late 2010 for a vote in 2011. There is no estimated cost to date.
The Horizon Plan was passed in 1992, a time when transportation and land use were not necessarily linked, says Mike Bruce, managing principal at ABMB Engineers, Inc., the firm spearheading the transportation planning effort.
“Now transportation and land use are more integrated during the process,” he says. “You’re going to work with not only what infill there could be, but what you can do to the existing road system to make it work better with this future infill.”
The trickiest part of marrying land use with transportation is addressing the sprawl that has made up Baton Rouge’s land-use plan over the past two decades, Bruce says. Connectivity between developed parts of the city would solve a lot of problems related to traffic congestion. Some of those solutions might involve upgrades to current roads, new roads or a fledgling transit system.
A rebooted area transit system will have to wait, however. Transit experts Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates were cut from the team in order to save money, reducing the price of the contract between Fregonese and the city-parish from $2 million to $1.8 million. The Metro Council signed off on the deal last month by authorizing the money out of a Hurricane Gustav recovery fund distributed by the Louisiana Recovery Authority.
Fregonese says the new plan still will address transit, but in less detail. For example, the team might identify corridors and design land use around it without designating a type of transit for those corridors.
“What was cut out was the bigger view, maybe a little more innovation and bringing in more national experience on the long-term outlook for a transit system,” Bruce says. “We’re still going to have to address transit.”
Fregonese, who has pushed the idea of a state-funded rail system between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, says some preliminary study might be done, such as pointing out potential high-density sites for stations and connectivity between them that might encourage the use of rail. Any major efforts would have to come from the state.
Mike Bruce is managing principal at ABMB Engineers, the firm spearheading the transportation planning effort for the updated Horizon Plan. Bruce says the team’s job is to come up with a plan that will garner the support of East Baton Rouge Parish’s elected officials and the majority of its population.
Baton Rouge’s suburban sprawl also will be addressed in urban design planning. Rex Cabaniss, principal at WHLC Architects, says the national trend has been to encourage redevelopment in the center and middle portion of a city because it is too expensive to continue expanding the perimeter outward.
“We will take a hard look at why the patterns in Baton Rouge have led to sprawl over the last number of decades, and policy programs that could incentivize development being more focused on the inner sections of the city,” he says. “This is nothing new. Cities have recognized this for decades. It’s something we want to promote in Baton Rouge now.”
One potential roadblock in the planning process could be Mayor Kip Holden’s $901 million capital improvements package, which includes more than $534 million in public safety and drainage improvements as well as $225 million in construction costs for Alive, the controversial riverfront economic-development project. Because public discourse has been so heated about the bond issue, there might not be much enthusiasm about creating a comprehensive plan so soon after the Nov. 14 vote.
Regardless of whether or not the bond issue passes, Fregonese is focused on finding the priorities that will make Baton Rouge a better place to live. If the bond issue does not pass, most of those projects likely will go into the comprehensive plan.
“The comprehensive plan won’t be ramped up until we know the outcome of the bond election,” says Gray, who also is the consultant overseeing the bond issue campaign. “I think it is perfectly timed to manage our planning and economic growth.”
East Baton Rouge Parish also is known for giving uncommon weight to the rights of property owners who object to the land use they have been designated. Bruce says the team’s job is to come up with a plan that will garner the support of the parish’s elected officials and the majority of its population.
“Individual landowners have rights, but that’s what the planning commission and the Metro Council are for,” he says. “Our plan has to be strongly supported, or it’s going to fail. There has to be strong motivation on the leadership level to enforce the plan once it’s in place, or there’s chaos.”
At the end of the day, Fregonese says, the final product should reflect the vision citizens have for the parish’s future.
“It’s not about our priorities,” he says. “People know what needs they have, what their priorities are. It’s our job to engage the public in various ways and help that vision evolve.”
By Emma James
Source: Baton Rouge Business Report