A new “Baton Rouge style” commercial retail center is nearing completion on the west side in Port Allen.
Attorney Tony Clayton is developing the 10,080-square-foot strip center, which is located at 3857 La. 1 South, and will be home to the west side’s first CC’s Coffee House, among other retailers.
The strip center will be known as The Villages at Huns Grove and is named for Clayton’s mother, whose nickname was Hun.
Tim Barfield has been named president of CSRS, six months after joining the local design and management firm as executive vice president.
He will succeed Michael Songy, one of the firm’s founding members and principals. The change becomes effective July 1 and comes as another founding principal in the firm, Curtis Soderberg, is retiring and selling his ownership stake in the company.
Also this week, the Capital Region Planning Commission kicked off a year-long planning process that will help determine which transportation improvement projects in the five-parish region ultimately become reality.
Here’s a rundown of other top stories making headlines in Daily Report this week:
- Due to flaws in the Affordable Care Act, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana is losing hundreds of millions of dollars on individual policies, and new CEO and president Dr. I. Steven Udvarhelyi says the insurer will have to re-evaluate on an annual basis whether it will continue participating in the market.
- The wheels are officially rolling on an effort to establish broadband internet throughout East Baton Rouge Parish.
- An organized effort to remove a hyacinth bloom from Crest Lake, one of the smallest lakes in the Baton Rouge Lakes system, is scheduled to kick off next week.
- A New Orleans investor who already owns two apartment complexes in Melrose East purchased a third on Tuesday for $1.78 million.
- Friends and co-workers mourned the loss this week of longtime WAFB newsman Paul Gates, who died Tuesday after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 69.
- Developer Art Lancaster is uncertain of his next step after the Planning Commission on Monday unanimously voted down his Timber Ridge subdivision, a proposed cluster development on Tiger Bend and Babin roads.
- The Capital Area Transit System’s Board of Commissioners has begun the process of whittling down the number of applicants who want to be the transit system’s next CEO after the application deadline ended Monday.
- Louisiana’s state and local governments are already on the hook for roughly $50 million in public and individual assistance payments related to the severe storms and floods that have slammed the state this year, according to the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
- For much of its lifespan, The Newtron Group Inc. operated under the radar in Baton Rouge’s petrochemical industry. But that started to change under its outgoing president Bruce Beard, who’s retiring effective June 30.
—Ryan Broussard
