Team kicks off work on LSU lakes plan

The design team selected to draw up a master plan for rehabilitation and improvement of the six LSU lakes and 45 acres of park surrounding them is in Baton Rouge today to begin formal work on the project with two days of visits with community leaders. LSU graduates Kinder Baumgardner of the SWA Group and Baton Rouge-based landscape architect Jeffrey Carbo spoke to reporters this morning about the initial challenges they face. Baumgardner says the team will address both the recreational capacity of the land around the lakes and the ecological viability of the lakes themselves. They will work with an ecologist to find ways to keep oxygen in the lakes to support life and filter silt out so that the lakes don’t fill up as they are now. “When you bend an ecosystem for your own use it will keep trying to revert back to what it used to be,” Baumgardner says. “It gets to be a bigger and bigger problem every year.” The Baton Rouge Area Foundation is underwriting the planning stage with $750,000 it raised for this purpose. Baumgardner says no financing is in place for later stages of the plan, so the team intends to aim high, then balance options with cost restraints later. They will “figure out what the right way to do it is and then give people options,” Baumgardner says. The planning stages also include meetings to gather public input, which will be held this winter. A study by Baton Rouge-based GEC Inc. released by BRAF in July suggests five of the six lakes are too shallow and will need dredging to survive. SWA Group has experience working with troubled waterways. The company previously worked on an expansion of the Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston that connected residential areas to downtown with pedestrian paths. —Kelly Connelly