A working group studying the city-parish Unified Development Code has nearly finished its work and will soon make recommendations on strengthening rules for floodplain development.
The group, composed of mostly city-parish staffers as well as private sector engineers, architects and a Baton Rouge Growth Coalition representative, has met several times over the past few months. Its work—determining which rules for developing in floodplains should be bolstered—is part of a multipronged effort at City Hall to address the parish’s flood risk more than a year after the historic flood of August 2016.
The group’s work was spurred by the Metro Council, which in recent months has debated several ways to tackle the parish’s flood risk. While council members have tweaked some rules, they rejected a proposed six-month moratorium for large developments in floodplains.
Planning Director Frank Duke, who has led the latest effort, says a draft will likely be sent out for public comment in the coming weeks. Among other things, the group will recommend making changes to the rules for using fill to mitigate flood risk in developments. They will likely not deal with building standards and some of the changes will be technical, Duke says.
“I’ve said from day one this is not going to be the end,” he says. “This is really some common sense modifications that we could do fairly quickly.”
Larry Bankston, director of the Growth Coalition, says he has sent out the first draft of the proposed changes to his members but has not reviewed it closely yet. He says one of the key issues for him is strengthening the upkeep and maintenance of retention ponds and other flood controls. Currently, homeowners are responsible for maintaining retention ponds in subdivisions once the development is complete, but Bankston says the city-parish is not doing enough to make sure the homeowners are doing that.
“That’s not being done,” he says. “You could do more for floodplain storage by going back and checking to see the retention ponds are operating correctly.”
Bankston also says he hopes the proposed changes will be reviewed by the engineering firm HNTB, which is under contract with the city-parish to conduct a stormwater study for the region.
Once the draft recommendations are put out for public comment—and sent to the Growth Coalition and the Federation of Greater Baton Rouge Civic Associations—Duke says the group will revisit and rework the suggestions before sending them to the Metro Council for a vote. The group is on schedule to send final recommendations to the council in February, he says.
The working group is essentially in round two of changes to floodplain regulations. The first wave came when Metro Council members voted to require developers to plan their subdivisions and other projects to withstand more severe storms. And once HNTB is done with its stormwater study of East Baton Rouge Parish, Duke says more changes are likely to come to the UDC.
—Sam Karlin
