With Baton Rouge poised for growth in 2006, it’s vital that the city make the best possible use of its assets, including the downtown riverfront.

A planning team composed of national and local firms has begun work on a riverfront master plan. The team is headed by the national firm Hargreaves and Associates, started by an LSU graduate. That firm worked on the landscape designs for the Shaw Center for the Arts.

The team’s mission is more important now because of the expansion of the economy and the new demands on Baton Rouge as an economic leader in the state.

While the recovery of New Orleans is critically important to the long-term future of Baton Rouge as well as the state, a full recovery in the Crescent City is going to be a long time coming, even with the best-case scenarios working out for the best.

At the same time, many new residents of greater Baton Rouge are from New Orleans and are a new constituency for downtown and its riverfront.

They want museums and restaurants, the arts and entertainment venues that are becoming part of the Baton Rouge scene.

The context of the next few years, though, is vital.

“2006 will be a banner year for the Baton Rouge economy,” according to Stephen Moret, president of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber.

The Chamber predicts there will be 10,000 to 15,000 new jobs in the nine-parish region this year. Some of them will be the result of the GO Zone tax credits approved by Congress to spur economic recovery in the hurricane-affected states.

The credits are complex and companies are still working out how to use them. But Moret said the credits can make a difference in tipping a company in the direction of investing in a deal it had been considering in the Baton Rouge area. The credits are authorized for three years. “We really need to take advantage of it now,” Moret said.

The credits will help with downtown and the riverfront by making deals at the margins more attractive.

The planning process for the riverfront isn’t the only planning gig under way in this area. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has planners working on a Baton Rouge plan flowing from the events of August. That will help build a regional plan with the firms commissioned by the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

If it sounds complex, it is. While the planners are among the world’s best, their collaboration and knitting together their work is the mission of local leaders.

If this process works out well, the results could be similar to the Plan Baton Rouge master plan that helped kick off a new era of downtown revitalization.

The Plan Baton Rouge master plan led by planner Andres Duany inspired more confidence and investment in downtown. It helped make possible the huge investment in downtown by state government.

That investment will slow down, as the state’s big buildings in the State Capitol complex are completed. But Moret said the downtown area is past the “inflection point” at which other investors are following the lead of redevelopment projects commissioned earlier.

As Moret put it, in a speech to the Press Club of Baton Rouge, “Katrina complicated our future but also accelerated it.”

We need to make the most of the horsepower gain.

Read the original story at the 2theadvocate.com website.