Town Planners to Hold Input Meeting Friday, March 10

St. Bernard Parish residents are being urged to attend what is being called a "pin-up and review community input" meeting Friday at 6 p.m. at the Chalmette Courthouse because a team of town planners financed by the Louisiana Recovery Authority will present several options for rebuilding Arabi and other parts of the parish and want feedback to map out a final plan to be presented Wednesday, March 15, at the courthouse.

Town planner Andres Duany and about 20 architects and planners have been in St. Bernard Parish this week studying neighborhoods and asking for citizens' input to design a rebuilding plan for the parish.

The planners’ work is being financed by the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which has sponsored two other planning sessions, called charrettes, in New Iberia and Lake Charles.

Duany, of Duany Plater-Zyberk Architects and Town Planners, led a series of meetings with local officials and community leaders Wednesday. He plans to use the information from residents and officials to draw a workable plan to improve the community as it rebuilds from Hurricane Katrina. Nearly every parish home and business was flooded.

Duany, who also led charrettes in 11 Mississippi coastal towns in October, told St. Bernard residents the parish must get better as it recovers.

But Duany told them the parish needs to improve as it recovers. "We're trying to come up with (different) solutions," he said. One solution will be to consider raising homes, although not everyone would want to raise their house as high as the water rose, he said.

"Your population has been stagnant for some time. If you are as good as you say you are, then something is holding you back as a community," Duany said.

"I believe you have a dysfunctional zoning code that allows anything to be built along Judge Perez," Duany said. The street, one of two main east-west thoroughfares, has become a hodgepodge of haphazardly developed commercial and residential properties on what should be the main commercial roadway in the parish.

Duany said he will offer to assist in rewriting the local zoning laws to provide more uniform and practical development.

Although Duany initially was to focus on the historic neighborhood of Old Arabi near the river, the effort now is focusing on the whole parish.

"It is a parish of neighborhoods," Duany said at a meeting Wednesday. "Each is technically different, and we are trying to assess the worth" of the neighborhoods to determine which are areas with homes that are financially worth saving and which are areas that should be built with elevated homes or with different types of building materials.

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