Residents have a stake in planning

• By DAVID J. MITCHELL
• Advocate River parishes bureau
• Published: Aug 4, 2009 - Page: 5B

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

GONZALES — About 50 Ascension Parish residents and others interested in how the parish will grow played planner for 2 1/2 hours Monday.

Using small chips representing various kinds of development, teams of people had to find a way to make room for the additional 100,000 people expected in the parish in the next 20 years.

The pretend planners could use a chip from their bank to change parishwide planning — such as trading up to increase building density or to change land uses.

The exercise Monday is one of three planned this week and is an initial part of the parish’s efforts to create a new comprehensive plan, a guiding document for future parish growth.

“The most important part of this exercise tonight is not going to be the chip game; it’s going to be the conversations,” Jeffery Winston, principal of Winston Associates, told people who would help facilitate the chip game later in the evening.

In a brief interview, he described the effort as painting with “a fat brush” to identify development issues and force the participants to wrestle with tradeoffs.

Winston Associates is a parish consultant helping the parish develop the comprehensive plan.

After about 30 minutes of working on the maps Monday night, team members began to reconcile their priorities with those of others in their group and with the limitations that exist in the parish, such as an abundance of vacant land in the 100-year flood zone.

One table set off land in flood zones and ended up driving development into municipalities and the developed portions of Prairieville.

Another group set up development along La. 22 in swampy, undeveloped flood zone in the southeast part of the parish to ease strains on schools in Prairieville.

Adrienne Conish, of Gonzales, said the chip game showed her what parish officials are dealing with and is a way to be proactive in dealing with growth.

After the maps were finished, each group explained its plan to the rest of the audience.

Winston told the group the maps will be overlaid in a computer and used to create four alternatives to be presented and honed at future public meetings.