If you’ve lived or worked on the northshore for more than about 10 minutes, you’ve probably discerned the one constant: growth – and we’re not talking about the grass.
Immediately after that nasty hurricane nigh onto five years ago, it seemed St. Tammany and Tangipahoa Parishes were the place to be. The ONLY place to be. In the whole wide world. Everybody – yes, EVERYBODY – was here. The surge in population brought a surge in tax revenue and retail sales, but it also brought growth even more accelerated than the most clairvoyant of demographers and planners had predicted. “Exponential” became the number-one descriptor, replacing “steady” as the word of choice to pair with “growth.”
Boomtown we were, and boomtown we are.
In the months that followed, as many folks repaired or rebuilt their southshore abodes and drifted back towards the now-medium-sized city on the Mississippi River, things settled down just a tad. The housing market, flooded with spec homes during the diaspora, faltered, failed, and has now begun a significant correction. The commercial building sector, already flush with projects, surged a bit, then receded, but may now be moving in the upwards direction, as well.
Trouble is, nobody had planned for this stuff.
New subdivisions were installed practically overnight, without the drainage and streets infrastructure they should have had. Commercial corridors became clogged with traffic as more and more consumers sought and bought more and more things at more and more places. It was almost too much to bear, and not just for one’s nerves: The infrastructure was strained, too.
“We’re no longer a quiet, laidback community,” said Tangipahoa Parish President Gordon Burgess.
Indeed, not. Are there any of those left?
Faced with a burgeoning population and enhanced demand for commercial and residential development, Tangipahoa Parish leaders found themselves in a bit of a pickle. For more than 30 years, the parish had a Planning Commission, but its function had been limited to subdivision approval. There was no zoning, though, which means anyone could build virtually anything, virtually anywhere – and nobody could stop them, or even regulate them.
The result was the ongoing initiative to build, so to speak, a set of zoning regulations that would help protect property-owners while guiding new development to appropriate places.
“We’ve been working on it for about three years,” Burgess said. “We’ve got our Planning Commission on board and we’re looking at possible zoning at this time.”
To advance the process, Burgess has appointed Alyson Lapuma, an 18-year veteran of the parish’s Building Department, as planning director.
“We opened this office in January 2007,” Lapuma said. “We haven’t been here that long. We didn’t have a Planning Department and the Building Department did most of it. Zoning has been needed, but after Katrina we saw a lot of development. We didn’t have the infrastructure in place but we couldn’t turn them down.”
While an ordinance passed in 2008 set a two-year timetable for completing zoning of Tangipahoa Parish, a short time after its passage the parish was named a “model community” by the Center for Planning Excellence, and given a template ordinance from which to build its own. The process then became two-pronged: adapting the ordinance to fit Tangipahoa’s needs while evaluating infrastructure and properties to discern appropriate zoning classifications.
It is not an overnight project.
“We’re having to make quite a few changes to (the CPE template) to meet our rural needs,” Lapuma said. “We worked on the map for quite a while, seeing what will and won’t work here. We’re waiting on a revised model. If the committee is OK with it, we’ll have plenty of community input.”
As the process moves forward citizen participation will be key, and Lapuma hopes to start that component of the zoning undertaking in mid May.
“We’re doing it not to just put regulations on people, but to protect their property and way of life,” Lapuma said. “The more development we allow in rural areas, the more people are unaccustomed to rural life. There’s a lot in (the CPE ordinance) not related to rural areas. They limit the number of stories of buildings, for example, and we just don’t deal with those types of things.”
Not yet, anyway.
“Everybody should have some type of plan,” Burgess said. “It’s just time. It protects your property rights.”
“When you hear ‘zoning,’ you might think we’re telling you what to do with your property,” Lapuma said. “But it’s usually those people who are the first to complain about what their neighbors are doing with their property.”
In St. Tammany Parish, where zoning ordinances have been on the books for 30 years, Planning Director Sidney Fontenot is finishing a three-year process that involves rezoning the entire parish to update the ordinance with new designations and more clarity. Completed in several phases, the last of which was approved by the Parish Council on April 1, the new ordinance should make real estate transactions easier and the permitting process smoother for property-owners and developers.
“We did it in three groups,” Fontenot said. “The ordinance was adopted in May 2007. Area 1, which was South Central St. Tammany, was adopted in April 2009. The two southern corners were adopted in September 2009. We had dozens of meetings. We had a kickoff meeting in each study area.”
The primary goal of the process, Fontenot said, was to update the 1980s version of the parish zoning ordinance, which had become outdated through nearly 30 years of growth.
“The old ordinance was 20-plus years old and was outdated,” Fontenot said. “We needed to zone property so we could plan for it with regard to infrastructure, and get ahead of the curve. And that ordinance (the 1980s version) was the second one. The first one had a rural description that allowed pretty much anything.”
Everything is a process.
“When you’re rezoning 800 square miles over three years, the fact of being able to do it within that time frame shows it was a good effort,” he said.
Nonetheless, Fontenot said he recognizes that not only will minor tweaking be expected for the new ordinance but that it, too, will eventually become outdated and require revision.
“If the Commission and Council hold with existing (new) zoning, people will stop buying cheaper land and seeking rezoning afterwards,” Fontenot said. “There may be some areas where changes will become appropriate over time. Things change over time, just like they did from the ‘80s when the last ordinance was adopted.”
While there may be adjustments to be made on all sides, the smoother sailing should become evident in short order.
“Realtors no longer have to negotiate a sale and then seek rezoning,” Fontenot said. “Agents can target clients to appropriate areas. From a resident’s viewpoint, you pretty much know what can be beside you now. It gives us some basis to plan for infrastructure. We’re trying to build infrastructure before land is developed.”
In both the short- and long terms, however, the results should be favorable for all involved.
“Over time, people will see the benefit of having determination of where things should be,” Fontenot said. “There should be fewer cases of residents having to worry about what can go next to them, as opposed to the hodge-podge that had occurred.”