After more than a year of planning, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation on Thursday evening released its master plan to rehabilitate the LSU Lakes at a public meeting attended by about 300 people.
The plan is ambitious—it includes dredging, creating a sediment bypass system as well as new bike and walking paths, forming new wetlands, expanding Milford Wampold Memorial Park and building a new May Street Park, among other aspects—and will take years to come to fruition. But perhaps the biggest challenge is coming up with the money to see the plan to fruition.
The price tag, originally estimated to be $100 million, has since been lowered to $40 million or so. During this year’s legislative session, Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration included the full $40 million for the project in the state’s construction budget. However, lawmakers stripped all but $13 million from it—and of that, only $3 million is guaranteed to materialize this year.
“Right now we have $3 million in the priority one category (in the budget) so I think we’ll be able to get that,” says Republican state Rep. Steve Carter, whose district includes the lakes. “The other $11 million is in priority five so we’ll have to work hard to get that.”
BRAF and lake project supporters will have to go back to the state Bond Commission later this year to secure the $3 million in priority one and to ask that the $11 million in priority five be moved up. Even if all that happens, however, some $30 million more will be needed to make the lakes project a reality.
Where will it come from?
No one knows for sure right now, though Carter says BRAF will be raising money from the private sector and will continue to work with the Legislature to try to secure as much in state funding as possible.
“Things are tight right now,” he says. “But we will continue to pursue it.”
The 23-page master plan unveiled Thursday night at the LSU Lod Cook Alumni Center is primarily visual, featuring slick renderings of the future vision for the lakes and new amenities. Commissioned by BRAF, the plan was created by SWA Group and Jeffrey Carbo Landscape Architects, and it comes after a year of public input meetings at which BRAF and the designers solicited ideas.
Other proposed new amenities in the plan include new promenades along Sorority Row and Dalrymple Drive at LSU, creating a new gathering area at the Lod Cook Alumni Center and shaping land for a boathouse at the foot of City Park Golf Course.
BRAF spokesman Mukul Verma says further details of the master plan will be released in about two months in a finalized report. More community meetings are expected to take place after that, but no firm dates have been set, he says.
BRAF says it has raised more than $750,000 from its fund donors to hire planners and engineers, and for community outreach. BRAF began working on the master plan after consulting with LSU and city-parish government, which own the lakes, and BREC, which cares for the lakes and operates a number of parks surrounding them.
Check out the complete master plan released Thursday evening.
—Stephanie Riegel and Steve Sanoski
