Exactly one year ago Tuesday, Metro Councilman Lamont Cole held a Blight Workshop for north Baton Rouge residents at the MLK Community Center, where 200 people pledged to fight blight in the area.
But 367 later, Cole says he’s “pleased, but not satisfied” with the progress that has been made.
“The efforts of members of our communities working to address blight have been tremendous,” he says. “But the breadth and depth of blight in Baton Rouge is severe.”
There have been some steps in the right direction, Cole says, like residents learning how to report blight using 311 Citizen Requests for Service—which has since seen increased action—and high schools and other groups organizing community cleanup days.
However, many of the blighted and abandoned properties being regularly reported are private property, says Cole, meaning the city-parish can’t bulldoze a vacant building or clean up the property without contacting the owner.
Therein lies the chief obstacle. Cole says he’s come across vacant lots owned by someone who died and whose heirs don’t know they own the property. And many property owners left Baton Rouge after the 2016 flood, he says, making them more difficult to contact.
Coleman Brown, infrastructure committee chair for the East Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce, says there are abandoned buildings on Airline Highway, North Foster Drive and at the intersection of Plank Road and Hollywood, among others, that he first reported immediately after Cole’s meeting a year ago. Nothing has been done to those properties.
Noting he’s been having ongoing conversations with city-parish leaders and community members, Brown says some solutions can be simple—like a group member’s planned PSA showing people how to properly tie their garbage bags, a method directly tied to litter reduction. Brown hopes to see increased investment in cleaning up blighted areas from the Redevelopment Authority and other groups.
“You don’t need a transit line on Plank Road,” Brown says. “You just need to clean up Plank Road.”
Earlier this year, a Business Report cover package explored Baton Rouge’s blight problem and efforts to address it. Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s administration also launched a Blight Strike Team earlier this year to tackle blighted and abandoned properties around the parish.
