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The city of Central isn’t really a city, and it’s not really in the center of anything. It’s a bedroom community of 27,000 folks spread out over 66 mostly rural square miles, north of Baton Rouge and east of Baker and Zachary. There is no main street or downtown and no multi-story buildings other than homes. City Hall is a donated house on Sullivan Road, and there are four full-time city employees, counting the mayor and the police chief without a force.

Central split from Baton Rouge in 2005, largely because it wanted its own school system, leaving residents with a job they didn’t necessarily sign up for: building a new town virtually from scratch.

Mayor Shelton Watts says there’s a lot of developer interest in the area. Left unchecked for a couple decades, Central could be another case study in urban sprawl, with neighborhoods, apartment buildings and strip malls scattered about. Instead, city officials and a band of local residents have decided they want an actual plan to guide their growth. The hard part will be working out the details; the harder part might be getting everyone to stick to the program.

“First, there has to be unity in the community,” says Patrick Moore of the Moore Planning Group, Central’s unofficial town planner, economic development coordinator, assistant chief of staff and head cheerleader for the past year. The Moore group, based in Alexandria and Baton Rouge, works with about a dozen towns in Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma, but this is the first time they or anyone else they know of has started with what amounts to a blank slate.

As Moore began holding public meetings with local residents, a couple things were immediately clear. First, schools are the key to Central’s success, which is fitting for a community named after the school it grew up around. Second, preserving Central’s country feel is paramount for its residents, so whatever the town becomes needs to be “rooted in the fabric of nature,” Moore says.

The plan is evolving, but the general idea is to focus development into relatively dense mixed-use villages that would be clustered around the schools. They don’t want big apartment buildings or smokestacks. Moore is enlisting the services of River Ranch architect Steven Oubre to help plan a “town center” that could include a new City Hall, a magnet school and other educational resources and, hopefully, high-value industry, such as a medical research center. Watts says a major company has expressed interest in making a $10 million to $20 million investment in Central; he wouldn’t name the company, but says it fits what he’s looking for.

Every square mile of Central was digitally mapped and rated on a scale of zero to five based on a number of criteria, including soil characteristics, infrastructure and school proximity, and propensity for flooding. The information was then compiled to create color-coded maps showing which areas are appropriate for commercial or residential uses, and which areas should be conserved as green space. If a developer is looking at Central, officials can easily point out the appropriate places for the development, rather than making those decisions on a case-by-case basis. Moore is partly inspired by the work of landscape planner and site designer Randall Arendt, who believes in designing around nature, not over or through it.

“Let the land sing,” Moore says, addressing more than 100 residents gathered at Central High School on Oct. 29. “Let it tell us what ought to be down there.”

The participants, most of whom have attended more than one of Moore’s meetings, divided themselves into four groups, addressing education, economic development, infrastructure and livability. Each group was led by a Central resident and a member of the Moore team and instructed to list what they’d like Central to have. Moore encouraged them to pretend they had a magic wand to make their dreams come true, and their wishes ranged from a few decent restaurants to a branch of a state university campus for the town center. Some said they just wanted somewhere to take an out-of-town visitor other than a high school football game.

The harder part was brainstorming about how to make it happen. Moore is already helping the town apply for grants and matching funds from various public and private sources. He asked residents to think of anyone they knew who could help. A state official, maybe? Or a rich relative?

Some participants suggested holding fundraisers. A few brave souls even brought up the possibility of new taxes.

“We’re talking tens of millions of dollars,” said one man in the livability group. “That’s not going to come from bake sales. Are we as a community going to step up and say we’re going to support these things we agreed on?”

And that’s the million-dollar question. No one likes to pay taxes, and few people, especially in politically conservative places like Central, like to be told what they can do with their land. The tiny fraction of the Central population who come to these meetings is going to have to sell their neighbors on the plan.

Moore had everyone in the room raise their right hand and repeat three times, “It’s gonna be hard.” Then he had them raise their left hands and say, “It’s gonna be really good.”

“To stay the same, you have to change,” Watts says. By that, he means that economic development in Central is both inevitable and necessary. The city simply can’t survive on residential alone. But using progressive tactics to focus development in certain areas could still allow the space for residents who want to live in the country.

Moore says Watts and Central’s five council members have so far presented a united front in terms of sticking with the program, and Moore says it helps that all five are elected at-large. But Watts says they don’t always agree. In July, four of the five council members approved a zoning change for someone who wanted to build mini-storage buildings on 2.89 acres on Greenwell Springs Road, over the objections of the zoning commission, according to The Advocate. A minor thing, perhaps, but it shows the temptation to make exceptions.

“I think we’ve learned from that mistake,” Watts says. “You can get into a lot of trouble with spot zoning.”

R.J. Saucier, a retired engineer and Central resident who’s been active in the planning process, says he fully expects that they’ll come up with a plan that’s flexible, but not too flexible.

“I hope we stick to it more than the Horizon Plan in Baton Rouge,” he says.

Watts says he doesn’t plan to have more than five city employees in the near future; instead, he’ll hire a private management company. CH2M Hill was the only company to respond to a recent request for proposals, but Watts had yet to review their proposal. East Baton Rouge Parish plans to stop providing basic services March 1.

Skip Smart, director of community development for Louisiana Economic Development, says Central might actually be fortunate that it’s starting from scratch, since there are fewer barriers to change. Not every town needs to hire its own equivalent of the Moore Planning Group, but every town should consider incorporating similar smart-growth principles, he says.

The Moore group has incorporated elements of much larger planning efforts like Louisiana Vision 2020 and Louisiana Speaks, the regional development plan for South Louisiana spearheaded by the Louisiana Recovery Authority. LRA board member Sean Reilly says Central isn’t the only town to embrace the spirit of Louisiana Speaks, but it might be the only town remaking itself that wasn’t already in a hurricane-recovery mode. Reilly acknowledges that committing to any land-use plan requires a leap of faith, but says the benefits of denser development and limiting growth in floodplains will manifest in higher property values and lower costs.

“For the Louisiana Speaks regional plan to become real, you have to get down to the granular, local level, the census-track level,” Reilly says. “At the end of the day, a lot of local communities have to come together and embark on the same journey. We have to think like Central’s thinking.”