The Baton Rouge Area Foundation revealed the first working designs for the Baton Rouge lakes master plan on Thursday during an open house in the Lod Cook Alumni Center.
After a presentation from Kinder Baumgardner — president of SWA Group, one of the project planners — attendees were invited to break up into groups to take a closer look at the maps, identify personal areas of interest and ask questions about the preliminary designs.
The lakes have been a mess since they were built, Baumgardner said. Despite the appearance of the lakes as a natural landscape, the area is man-made and requires maintenance.
Issues that have arisen over the years include poor water quality, missing signs, erosion and barriers to access, Baumgardner said. The proposed designs focus on addressing water quality, dredging and grading, traffic circulation, programming, architecture and landscape.
Baton Rouge resident Nathaniel Klumb said if even half of what has been proposed by the planners can be carried out, the lakes will be significantly improved.
“The lakes are as good as we have, but they’re not really that great right now,” Klumb said. “I have pedaled in them many times, and most people ask me why I even go out there.”
Klumb said he is glad to see the working designs showed greater connectivity both around and between the lakes.
Baumgardner said the plans displayed during the meeting were not finalized drafts, but rather were framework designs.
“What we’re showing you guys is the results of work, listening to people, putting pen to paper,” Baumgardner said. “After listening and researching and doing all of that analysis, you’ve got to draw a line, and the first time you draw a line, people react, so that’s what today is about.”
BRAF hosted the second of its master plan meetings in December, allowing community members to suggest designs for lakefront parks and other amenities and generate solutions on where to relocate the materials dredged from the lakes.
The working designs produced by planners SWA Group and Jeffrey Carbo Landscape Architects built off the ideas developed during the December meeting, as well as information gathered from University students and commentary provided online.
BRAF director of communications Mukul Verma said feedback gathered from attendees will be passed on to the planners who will make appropriate design changes, revealed on April 29. The final plans will be presented to BRAF and its partners this                            summer.
“The goal at the end of the process is to listen to this community, because you ultimately own the lakes,” said BRAF executive vice president John Spain.
One of the project’s major undertakings will be dredging the lakes. 
According to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the healthy average for lake depth is a minimum of 5 feet. At 6.5 feet deep, College Lake is the only one of the lakes to meet or exceed that average.
In 2008, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hired engineering firm GEC Inc. to develop a plan to restore the lakes, which included dredging the lakes to increase their depth.
Baumgardner said a cofferdam system will likely be used to divide the lakes into segments and excavate each segment individually to minimize the effects on wildlife, homeowners and the University.
“I was glad that they didn’t seem to be planning to dredge the lakes all at once,” said Baton Rouge resident Bobbie Marschall. “I worry most about wildlife surviving the dredging, and then in the case of the birds returning, of the pelicans returning.”
One of the primary goals of the project is to preserve the history of the lakes and to protect and improve the lakes’ ecology, Baumgardner said.
Preliminary design ideas include building a public boathouse, forming wetlands to produce greater diversity, creating multi-use and separate bike paths and establishing a gateway to the University between Dalrymple Drive and Stanford Avenue and an LSU Bird Sanctuary.
BRAF raised $750,000 for the design process, but the funding necessary to execute the project has yet to be obtained, Verma said.
“The actual dredging and all that work is going to cost tens of millions of dollars,” Verma said.

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Zoe Geauthreaux

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