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The East Baton Rouge Planning Commission has called on industry professionals to help them in simplifying and combining all city and parish development regulations and procedures into a single, unified code.
The Unified Development Code Committee has been meeting weekly since June to merge parish subdivision regulations with its zoning, landscape, tree, sign and flood-prevention ordinances and eliminate inconsistencies. The effort is designed to make the agency more user-friendly, said EBRP planning director Troy Bunch.
"This is not a wholesale revision to the zoning ordinance or the subdivision ordinance, but a Unified Development Code is a consolidating of land-use regulations into one comprehensive and easy-to-use document," Bunch said. "Modern development tends to require review by multiple agencies. This consolidation should allow the development process to be more efficient."
The committee includes developer Charlie Cole, a board member of the Baton Rouge Growth Coalition, a group of real estate and development professionals; Sam Bacot, attorney; Paul Boudreaux, engineer; Mike Falgout, Realtor; Jeff Mancuso, banker; Terry Smith, contractor; and Thomas Wallace, real estate appraiser.
Bunch said the "housekeeping" process, a mandated action item in the Horizon Plan master land-use plan for the city adopted in 1992,...