Happy New Year! The CPEX team is excited for a new decade of planning and progress for Louisiana communities! We are already hard at work building new partnerships and new initiatives for the year ahead and beyond. But before we get too far into the new year, I want to take a moment to look back at 2019 to reflect on the successes we can celebrate and the seeds we’ve planted for the future.
CPEX worked with Ascension Parish leaders and residents to complete the 2019 Ascension Parish Master Land Use Plan, which was adopted in May, and we were hired by the Town of Madisonville to engage their residents in developing a vision that will guide their growth and development over the coming years to result in beautification, more bicycle and pedestrian facilities, flood risk reduction, and new economic opportunities -- while maintaining the small town feel that residents and visitors love.
In rural Louisiana, we worked with the LSU AgCenter’s Healthy Community Coalition to design and install Greensburg’s first crosswalk, and we are continuing our work with the Healthy Community Coalitions in Tensas and Madison parishes to implement priority items from their Complete Streets Action Plans that will support healthy, active lifestyle choices.
With support from Foundation for Louisiana and the Kresge Foundation, CPEX developed “Water You Gonna Do?” -- a game designed to engage community leaders with diverse points of view in a conversation about water management. We worked with partner organizations including Foundation for Louisiana, The Nature Conservancy, Healthy Gulf, Sea Grant, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, and the Louisiana Pontchartrain Basin Foundation to refine the rules and materials. We then hosted workshops for undergraduate students of Landscape Architecture at the Robert Reich School for Landscape Architecture, Restore the Mississippi River Delta and the members of the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance to help increase their understanding of how water management issues affect their lines of work and the range of policies, programs, partnerships and infrastructure available to help manage water as flood risk increases. CPEX has been selected to present the game at the Association of State Floodplain Managers National Conference in Fort Worth, the State of the Coast conference in New Orleans, and the Adaptation Futures Conference, an international forum of global thought-leaders on climate change adaptation in New Delhi, India in April 2020.
We also published new resources in 2019: the “Climate Change Adaptation Manual for Louisiana” and the “Coastal Community Resilience Planning Guide” to provide residents, business owners, elected officials and community leaders the information they need to fully understand the flood risks they face and the tools they need to manage those risks and build community resilience.
CPEX continued our role as thought leaders with the 2019 Smart Growth Summit, which focused on how climate change is affecting Louisiana and how we can plan to adapt so that our state can address climate change challenges effectively and capitalize on new opportunities for economic growth.
In 2018 we brought together the Governor and executive state agency officials to discuss the range of coastal impacts on agency functions and develop strategies for planning around those impacts.
Planning is all about vision and playing the long game. We’ve planted seeds in the past year that will grow and bear fruit in the years to come. On the policy front, CPEX has developed the partnerships and resources needed to begin implementation of the Adaptive Governance Initiative in 2020. The Governance Initiative is an outgrowth of the 2018 state agency resilience building workshop we conducted where the Governor along with the executive staff of each state agency worked to deepen their understanding of the full range of impacts associated with land loss and climate change, and develop strategies to help state agencies address these challenges in a collaborative and coordinated manner. In 2020, CPEX will continue to work with the Governor and Louisiana state agencies to begin implementation of these strategies.
CPEX began work with the Louisiana Watershed Initiative to address the flood risk that impacts every person in Louisiana. We are working with five state agencies to achieve transformative change in how Louisiana manages flood risk statewide through regional collaboration, science-based decision-making, and best practices in floodplain management.
In 2019, the Opelousas Downtown Development District selected CPEX to help them prepare a Master Plan to guide the future development and design of Opelousas’s downtown. We’ve kicked off the project with stakeholder interviews where we’ve learned from residents what they love most about the city and their aspirations for the downtown. We’re looking forward to a citizen-driven process that results in recommendations for land use changes, infill development opportunities, streetscape and connectivity improvements, and design guidelines.
CPEX is also very excited about the planning process we are leading for Southern University and the surrounding Scotlandville neighborhood. The Southern University Campus Master Plan and the Scotlandville Neighborhood Area Plan process kicked off at the end of 2019, and we are thrilled to be working with the University and members of the surrounding community to catalyze investment, revitalization, and community engagement around these historic anchors of our city.
Implementation is always our end goal at CPEX. In order to accelerate implementation of projects that will enhance our neighborhoods and key corridors in Baton Rouge, CPEX is launching an Impact Project initiative. We will work with neighborhood stakeholders and city partners to identify opportunities to bring good ideas to life on our streets and public spaces. We spent some of 2019 researching and refining this concept, and we are eager to bring it to the streets of Baton Rouge in 2020. We’re going to start small and work our way up, so keep an eye out for more news about CPEX Impact Projects in the coming year.