BusinessReport.com

“Building the future” may be an overworked metaphor, but that’s exactly what’s happening on the Mississippi River between Pointe Coupee and West Feliciana parishes.

When it’s completed in summer 2010, the John James Audubon Bridge will span the river from New Roads in Pointe Coupee to the West Feliciana town of Starhill, a few miles south of St. Francisville. The bridge is a historical event for both banks, though Pointe Coupee has the most catching up to do in terms of girding itself for what comes after the ribbon-cutting.

The mostly rural, largely isolated parish has a public school system ranked near the bottom, zero land-use policy and inadequate roads. A lot of people are working hard to repair such problems; they fear not doing so will have a devastating impact on the parish—unregulated development and outmigration, for instance—once the bridge opens.

But it’s all new, the challenges are significant and the clock is ticking.

For one, fixing a broken public school system takes time, if it happens at all. Witness East Baton Rouge schools. But there’s a tangible deadline in Pointe Coupee: The fear is that once the bridge is finished residents with school-age children will defect to West Feliciana and better schools.

Bryan Jones helped start Public Action for Change in Education, a group of parish residents who banded together a year ago to improve Pointe Coupee public schools. As it is now, parents with enough money send their kids to either the parish’s lone Catholic school or the private False River Academy, he says.

“Basically they’ve washed their hands of the public school system,” says Jones, who’s also the TIMED spokesman for the Audubon Bridge project.

He calls the school system “deplorable,” with test scores and morale in the basement. At some point, people lost faith in the system and stopped bothering to vote on school issues, assuming nothing would change, Jones says. That’s bad for Pointe Coupee, he says, since good schools are the primary indicator for economic growth and residential development in parishes where those things are happening, like West Feliciana, Ascension and Livingston.

“People are building homes on False River, but a lot of people are building them as camps,” Jones says. “They would love to live here but can’t because of the schools.”

With financial help from private donors with connections to Pointe Coupee, PACE has already begun shaking things up: A public-awareness campaign in advance of the 2006 school board elections brought voters out in numbers not seen in years, with the result that five of eight incumbents—some 20-year veterans—were exchanged for new blood.

Aletha Moore, a community activist and PACE co-founder, says the group is in the process of formalizing itself as a tax-exempt nonprofit. She admits some parish residents were initially leery of PACE’s goals.

“PACE wanted to be forward-thinking, progressive,” Moore says. “What can we do differently? How can the community come together to make positive change? Once you start talking to people, everybody wants the same thing. We just have different ideas how to get it.”

People are interested now—even excited, she says. Moore has no illusions that bringing substantive change to a crippled school system will be easy. She concedes it can be overwhelming at times and that “sometimes you just want to throw up your hands.”

Success breeds success, Moore reminds herself, insisting the parish’s survival depends on good schools. That’s why the organization is open to all the advice and expertise it can get and why PACE has joined forces with Advance Baton Rouge, a group created to help right East Baton Rouge’s foundering school system.

“If we don’t pay attention to what we do in this community, this bridge is either going to be the way in or the way out,” Moore says. “Hopefully with changes in the system we can start telling people ‘Come and stay. This is a beautiful place to be.’ ”

Then there’s land use, which brings the “z” word—zoning—into play.

Pointe Coupee Parish administrator Jim Bello says land-use planning has become a big topic ever since Katrina temporarily swelled the parish’s population by about 5,000. Normally the population is around 23,000.

“Katrina was a wake-up call,” Bello says.

Without a planning and zoning policy, the parish’s rural areas are vulnerable to strip joints, industrial, sprawling subdivisions, trailer parks. The newly minted Pointe Coupee Planning committee will soon pick a consultant to draw up a parish land-use plan.

“Nothing is more important than what we’re doing right now,” Bello says. “I can’t be just a lot of fluff. We need to make sure it can be implemented.”

He describes past parish planning efforts as “pie in the sky.” This time, Pointe Coupee is getting financial and logistical help from the Center for Planning Excellence, an arm of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.

Elizabeth “Boo” Thomas, CPEX president, says few parishes have comprehensive land-use plans, though Pointe Coupee is under greater pressure because of the bridge project. Such planning projects typically take about a year, she says.

“I would be really nervous about this new bridge, and they are,” Thomas says. “It has the potential to change the way of life they’ve always known.”

But things are moving. Thomas says she feels “pretty good” about progress so far. She stresses that the process is not about CPEX imposing its own zoning plan on the parish but rather a grass-roots project to create some control over development. Thomas concedes it’s not always an easy sell.

“One of the big fears is people are telling me what to do with my property,” she says.

Thomas says some of the effort’’s most outspoken foes in the beginning are now totally onboard. Still, it’s tough to get everyone to weigh in—especially in a mostly rural parish.

“I think they can pull it off,” Thomas says. “The consultant team is critical. I think they’ve got a great planning committee appointed. You just have to make sure you continue to reach out to all segments of the parish and make sure that all of them are involved.”