From star-gazing to exploring swamps and even glimpsing scarlet macaws, BREC’s (Recreation and Park Commission for the Parish of East Baton Rouge) award-winning park system offers an astounding diversity of experiences for residents across East Baton Rouge Parish. The BREC system spans more than 6,500 acres and includes 175 parks, 56 recreation centers, 3,350 acres of conservation land, and 18 special facilities. BREC’s system has won the prestigious National Recreation and Parks Association (NRPA) Gold Medal three times, the top honor conveyed by the NRPA to recognize the #1 park system in the county.
How does a gold-medal park system stay at the top? “Imagine Your Parks 3” charts an action plan for the next decade, with equity as an underlying focus. Agency worked with BREC to develop the “Imagine Your Parks 3” system plan, which provides a vision and implementation roadmap for the park system’s next ten years.
Through the planning process, Agency worked with BREC and the community to define what equity means. Community and staff input shows that equity for BREC encompasses many themes: priority investment locations, acknowledging history, welcoming and accessible design strategies, specialized recreation programming, community voice, and inclusive operations.
With 140 days over 90°F in 2023 and 21% of all BREC buildings located within 100-year floodplains, resilience is another key topic for the parish. Parks serve as critical resilient infrastructure, and the increasing regularity of flooding and rising summer temperatures today puts the system under even more pressure to address the needs of the broader community. The planning process will identify how to create cooler parks that act as natural air conditioning to counteract the urban heat island effect, as well as identify new stormwater strategies for parks to reduce flood risk downstream.
“Imagine Your Parks 3” is grounded in five key principles: Welcoming Everyone, Connected People, Connected Places, Connected Environment, and Moving Forward Sustainably. These principles reflect input from thousands of community members who shared feedback through a broad range of engagement opportunities: a statistically valid survey, door-to-door canvassing, dozens of pop-up engagement events, stakeholder focus groups, interactive community workshops, online surveys, and beyond. The plan’s implementation roadmap charts a course for bringing the plan’s vision to life over the next ten years. As part of the plan, Agency developed an equity-based methodology for prioritizing capital projects.
With the plan’s official adoption in August 2024, BREC now turns its focus towards implementation, ensuring that the next chapter in the system’s history will further amplify equitable access, resilience, and high quality parks and recreation.
The Agency team includes CPEX, Octagon Media, Spackman Mossop Michaels, HR&A, and ETC.
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