BusinessReport.com

Nearly two years of work toward a land-use plan for Pointe Coupee Parish collapsed in a heap late last year. Piecing together exactly why isn’t easy.

“I don’t want to talk about it to be perfectly honest with you, because that’s all behind us now,” says Jimmy Lyles, a Pointe Coupee resident recently hired by the parish Police Jury to manage the newly restarted planning process.

Lyles is the former president of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, and has held the same job at chambers in Oklahoma City and Corpus Christi, Texas. Lyles, the committee formed to direct the process and the new consultant are scheduled to meet in a public forum at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9 at the Cottonpoint Community Center in New Roads.

“There were just some misunderstandings from both sides of the thing of what the process should be and how it would come about, and the thing was, both sides were hardheaded,” Lyles says, without spelling out who the “sides” were. But it’s gotten to the point where they need to get the process going again, “simply because, when that bridge opens up, we don’t know what the impact of that bridge will be on this side of the river, and if we’re not ready, it could really be a bad impact,” he says.

“That bridge” is the John James Audubon Bridge, which will span the Mississippi River from New Roads in Pointe Coupee to the town of Starhill near St. Francisville in West Feliciana Parish. The bridge is scheduled for completion in the summer of 2010 and will likely bring new residential development.

The way things stand now, that development would be entirely unchecked, as there is no zoning in Pointe Coupee Parish outside of New Roads, Lyles says. The permitting and building codes mostly deal with construction. He says whether the new bridge brings major or minor changes, the parish needs to have a plan in place ahead of time if residents want to preserve the rural flavor of their community.

Helping to design that plan will be John Fregonese, head of an urban and regional planning firm based in Portland, Ore. The Police Jury hired his firm on March 11. Fregonese also is the planning consultant for West Feliciana and was one of the leaders of Louisiana Speaks. He says Pointe Coupee’s challenges include protecting the long-term health of False River and figuring out how to interact with the growing Baton Rouge metro area.

“We design a process that allows a community to take this where they want to go,” Fregonese says. “No one wants an outsider to tell you what to do, and, basically, we design a process that starts by listening to the community and finding out what they want to accomplish, and helping them devise strategies to accomplish that.” He says the process will take about a year.

Fregonese was the parish’s second choice. The parish planning committee originally hired Moore Planning Group, based in Alexandria, which received approval in part because of its Louisiana roots. A published report from an October 2007 Police Jury meeting is vague about why the planning committee wanted to sever ties with Moore. But whatever happened, it wasn’t pretty. Patrick Moore is quoted as saying he had “never been so offended in my life.”

“This is not about us,” Moore says in the report. “We walked into something here.” The Police Jury delayed action at that meeting; eventually, Moore resigned as planning consultant but stayed on as a grant-seeker and writer, and has since helped the parish obtain at least $200,000 in grant money with more possibly on the way, he says. In a recent Business Report interview, he chose his words carefully.

“What was disappointing to me, from the outside looking in, is that they were all good people, and they all want the same thing,” Moore says. Pointe Coupee had never done planning, and sometimes when you do something different, you “get spooked a little bit.”

“We were probably a little ahead of our time to some degree. But they’re gonna get there.” He calls Fregonese a “master” who does “excellent work.” Moore says he still has an active service agreement with the parish and, once the plan is finished, the Moore group might have the opportunity to help with its implementation. One advantage of going with Fregonese, Lyles says, is that Fregonese is working for a flat fee of $214,000. Lyles says with Moore, it was hard to pin down exactly how much the process would cost.

“I’m still looking for specifics, specific objective tasks that were set forth and presented to Patrick Moore, that were not met,” says Warren Valdry, who was on the planning committee at the time. “These backroom decisions were made; I don’t know why Patrick Moore isn’t there today myself. I can’t answer that.”

He says Moore wasn’t the problem. The whole process was uncharted waters for Pointe Coupee, and the parish didn’t have a firm idea of what it wanted from Moore. Valdry believes having a project director like Lyles from the beginning might have helped. Valdry also says he’s unsure why the Police Jury cut off its relationship with the Baton Rouge-based Center for Planning Excellence, which was involved in the early stages of the process. Other sources say CPEX was effectively run out of town, perhaps out of fear that folks from Baton Rouge were trying to tell Pointe Coupee residents what to do with their land. According to published reports, some parish landowners felt they had been left out of the early stages of the process.

Valdry says the original planning committee might not have been as representative as it could have been of all segments of the community. But it was a start, and he hopes there is better communication about the process throughout the parish. This is important work, he believes, and everyone needs to be involved.

“I guess the most heartfelt issue, for lack of a better choice of word, is that we have lost so much time that we didn’t have,” Valdry says. He says he’ll be at the April 9 meeting, this time in the audience, and he’s ready to get involved if asked.

Joanna Wurtele is a Pointe Coupee native and community activist who left the state at age 25, came back 30 years later and “fell in love with Louisiana all over again.” She also plans to attend the April 9 meeting.

“We have a choice,” she says. “We can embrace the change, and keep our identity, or become a Baton Rouge bedroom community.”