Inside Report for December 13, 2011
To hear Ascension Parish officials say it, the most recent Baton Rouge Loop tour through the parish was just a function of the engineers finishing their contracts.
The southern loop, we have been told, is just a vestigial wing that the evolution in planning for the toll-funded beltway has deemed not to be fruitful.
But it’s just a little unsettling to some in Ascension that even after Ascension Parish President Tommy Martinez and the leaders of two other parishes pulled out in April 2010, the loop was up there as big as ever Dec. 6 on the aerial map posted at Pecan Grove Elementary School in Gonzales.
Depending on your point of view, the loop, a concept discussed for the Baton Rouge area since the early 1960s, is either the phoenix that keeps rising from the ashes or that dang turkey that won’t die no matter how many times you fill it full of No. 4 shot.
The fact is the loop process has continued despite the well-publicized divorce of parish presidents. Those engineers and their contracts will produce a document that provides a proposed highway corridor through Ascension and the four other parishes on the course of the 85- to 90-mile loop.
Backing from the Federal Highway Administration for that plan will clear the way for the next phase of planning — closer scrutiny on a refined route in selected areas — if the political will and the $15 million to $20 million necessary are available.
It is that point in the process on which Martinez and other officials’ no worries argument rests: The money and will are not present for a southern loop because it is not economically feasible as a toll route. Loop backers will focus elsewhere.
Leaders and economics change, however.
The loop plan that supposedly isn’t going to happen in Ascension will be on a shelf somewhere, waiting to happen under just the right circumstances.
Baton Rouge and loop officials also provided mixed messages at the meeting, at one turn talking about the latest meetings as the end of a long process, with a next phase likely not to focus on Ascension. At the other turn, they said things that do not appear to spell the end of a loop in Ascension.
“The fact that some elected officials have come out against the project, they are just part of the decision-making process. Their input is obviously important, but so are those of the public and other elected officials,” said Mike Bruce,managing principal of ABMB Engineers Inc., a leading loop firm.
Bruce claimed a silent majority supports the loop, noting that various polls of Ascension residents have shown support for the concept.
“There hasn’t been a groundswell of opposition from Ascension Parish,” Bruce said.
By pulling out, Martinez may have avoided blame for a troublesome project he can’t control and that won’t be started while he is in office, but he may also have abdicated any say he might have had on how it turns out.
David J. Mitchell covers Ascension
Parish for The Advocate. He can be reached at dmitchell@theadvocate.com.