In the News

Opinion from The Baton Rouge Advocate 3.20.04

Auditing rules only first step

If Baton Rouge is going to grow physically the way the city needs to during the coming decades, it needs a set of ordinances and growth regulations in line with the city's ambitions for a better quality of life.

That's why we welcome a "Smart Growth" audit of the city's planning and development codes, sponsored by the mayor's smart-growth advisory committee and Plan Baton Rouge, the downtown planning organization.

Three national experts on planning from academia and politics will look at the Unified Development Code, the city-parish ordinances that control how neighborhoods and commercial projects are developed. The purpose of the project is to see if the detailed codes are compatible with the city's Horizon Plan and national standards for quality growth in a city.

We suspect many parts of the Baton Rouge code either don't address the national standards -- perhaps even the overall planning guidelines in the local Horizon Plan -- or are so often waived or ignored by city-parish authorities that the rules don't matter anyway.

The audit of the code is only a first step, however. It doesn't address the crying need for more aggressive enforcement of the planning standards embraced on paper in the Horizon Plan and other city-parish plans.

The audit should show gaps in the codes that need to be filled, but it will take political leadership -- either from City Hall or from citizen groups -- to change the codes for the better, and then to make sure that they stick when the heat is on to allow waivers of the rules for particular projects before the Planning Commission and the Metro Council.