Now that the former East Baton Rouge Parish Department of Public Works has been separated into six different departments and new leaders have been hired for each division, Business Report sat down with K. Stephen Bonnette—who recently returned from Texas to become the head of the city-parish’s new Department of Transportation and Drainage—to talk about his plans for traffic and infrastructure in the Capital Region.
Bonnette, who has spent most of his career in the private sector, says he was drawn back to Baton Rouge by the DPW reorganization.
“I had been living in San Antonio at the time, and the City of San Antonio had done something like that about 10 years ago. I was kind of fascinated by that process. But it was the position and the opportunity was more interesting,” he says in a Q&A from the current issue. “Frankly, Baton Rouge is the only place I would go outside of Texas.”
Already, Bonnette says, the DPW reorganization is allowing for quicker responses to resident complaints.
“I’ve already gotten good feedback even just dealing with the public. I try to respond in a timely manner and people have said, ‘Wow, I didn’t expect you to get back with me so soon,’” he says. “Under the old Public Works structure, it was just difficult to stay on top of all of those things. I think that was one of the goals of creating new departments: we can be more responsive to the citizens.”
As for how Bonnette thinks Baton Rouge’s notoriously congested roadways can be addressed, he suggests the Complete Streets policy—which the city-parish adopted late last year—is a good start.
“Complete Streets forces us to think about how we can make this work for every mode of transportation, so it is not about moving cars; it is about moving people—moving people in cars, moving people on bikes, moving people on sidewalks, moving people in buses,” he says. “That is our desire now: to implement everything we can into a corridor and that gives people choices.”
He also thinks the new business-led effort to improve traffic and infrastructure called Capital Region Industry for Sustainable Infrastructure Solutions, or CRISIS, will also help identify and implement real solutions to at least some of the problems.
“I’ve seen it happen in other communities. It is absolutely essential to get business involved,” Bonnette says. “Business leaders realize how much a lack of good infrastructure affects their bottom line. When they get very motivated in helping on a situation like this, it is welcomed. I believe their focus needs to be on the Legislature and on the next governor, making sure that there is not just a verbal commitment to improve infrastructure but there is also a financial commitment and that is the key.”
Read the full Q&A with Bonnette. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
