In her latest column, Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel recalls how Baton Rouge Area Foundation Executive Director John Spain and East Baton Rouge Parish Planning Director Frank Duke were scheduled to speak at the annual meeting of the Louisiana Chapter of the American Planning Association last Tuesday in Houma.
“The subject: ‘Planning for Health in the Diabetes Belt,’ which was a catchy title for a discussion about the planned Baton Rouge Health District,” she writes.
Riegel notes the APA had invited the pair to speak about the district and the $700,000 plan BRAF commissioned on it because in planning circles, the nascent health district is already recognized as a shining example of best practices that marries smart growth and economic development.
“Here in Baton Rouge, however, a small but vocal group of activists has vilified the health district, using it as a flashpoint for racial tensions and turning it into a symbol of the economic disparity between prosperous south Baton Rouge and the impoverished north,” she writes.
The activists have been so effective that after a rancorous, two-hour meeting last month, the Metro Council deferred a vote on officially adopting the district as part of the city’s FuturEBR land-use plan, Riegel says. Two days later, the planning commission—at BRAF’s request— asked the council to pull the item from its agenda, at least for the time being.
Riegel says the contrast between the way the district was viewed by experts from elsewhere and the Metro Council in its own city was not lost on Duke, who noted in an email: “It is ironic that something being held nationally and internationally as a model for encouraging private sector entities to work together and coordinate efforts in a period of reduced resources received so little credit in the place where it was created.”
While it’s true that a prophet in his own land is seldom appreciated, Riegel says, it’s not as though the community at large does not recognize the potential upside of establishing a health district in an existing medical corridor.
“What’s disturbing is how a small group has tried to turn a universally beneficial initiative into a racial and political hot potato,” she writes. “That they have managed to take the issue as far as they have speaks volumes about the sorry state of contemporary public discourse, which is increasingly devoid of all reason. But those are topics for another day.”
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