Local and Regional Planning Efforts

“The community overwhelmingly identified drainage as the highest single priority for flood recovery. …[N]o single project by itself can resolve the flooding issue. The solution ultimately will require many coordinated regional and local actions.”

-Denham Strong, 2019, p. 26

Following the 2016 floods, Denham Springs residents participated in multiple planning initiatives designed to shape recovery and new development in the city. In 2017, the city worked with the Capital Region Planning Commission (CRPC) with support from the Louisiana Office of Community Development Disaster Recovery Unit (OCD-DRU) to create and adopt Denham Strong: Strategy for the Future, a long-term community recovery plan. Through this process, the community established the following vision statement:

“Denham Springs is a family-focused, well-connected, clean, safe, active, and resilient community.”

-Denham Strong, 2019, p. 1

Since adoption, many of the recovery projects identified in the report have been initiated, such as the bicycle and pedestrian master plan that the city adopted in 2019.

In addition to city processes, residents are also impacted by parish plans for future development. Before the 2016 floods, Livingston Parish commissioned a comprehensive master plan. The parish adopted this plan in late 2019, in order to quickly move forward with soliciting funding to begin parish-wide zoning and drainage plans (Kennedy, 2019). The parish is also engaged in hazard mitigation projects in Denham Springs based on its 2016 plan. These projects include buyouts of repetitive flood loss property in the neighborhood south of Spring Park, including the old First Baptist Church building located on River Road.

State processes operate as another level of influence on life in Denham Springs in the present and in the future. For example, the Office of Community Development and the governor of Louisiana started the Louisiana Watershed Initiative, which will cause a shift in stormwater management throughout the state. The Louisiana Watershed Initiative embraces a larger scale, watershed approach to drainage, which is new in Louisiana. This new perspective may help facilitate collaboration over competition among neighboring jurisdictions to help institute sustainable development practices throughout the region to reduce future flood risk.