Eight months into his job as planning director of East Baton Rouge Parish, Frank Duke says he’s ready to start making some “radical changes” to the city’s outdated zoning code that will include reorganizing, simplifying and clarifying the regulations and requirements in the code.
“There is a good foundation of planning in Baton Rouge but we need to make some changes,” Duke told the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge at its weekly luncheon today. “In 30 years I have never found a development ordinance more in need of work than this one.”
Duke, who came to the Planning Department last summer from Norfolk, Virginia, says one of the biggest changes he plans to make is to the city’s parking regulations. His staff is currently working on revisions to the existing set of rules to reflect the different needs of diverse neighborhoods. Currently, the parking regulations for a suburban shopping district, for instance, are the same as for Mid City or downtown, which doesn’t make any sense, Duke said.
Another planned change will be to implement the five design levels that were outlined in the city’s 2011 FuturEBR land use plan. Those levels call for a form-based zoning code, which designates the appropriate form and scale—and, by extension, character—of development rather than only distinguishing among land-use types.
Duke also plans to revise the city’s landscape regulations, which he calls a “disaster.” He cited a well-known parking lot at the corner of South Acadian Thruway and Perkins Road as an example of a “sea of asphalt,” without shade or landscaping, and said Baton Rouge is “a city of failed parking lots” in need of better landscaping and design.
Some of the changes Duke hopes to make have already been approved by the Metro Council, though neighborhood groups have to buy in to the ideas and work to help implement them. Other changes will require council approval.
Though Duke expects to get some pushback—and, in fact, already has—he said the purpose of simplifying and streamlining the zoning process is to make it easier for development and growth to occur.
“The market will determine what happens,” he said. “All I can do is make it easier for growth to happen. I create the opportunity for development.”
—Stephanie Riegel
