BATON ROUGE - The mayor of East Baton Rouge provided residents with the latest developments in connection with the Parish's Stormwater Master Plan, Monday morning.

Accompanied by representatives from consultant from infrastructure solutions firm HNTB, Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome announced the program's new website, which will serve as a resource of new information. The web address is Stormwater.brla.gov

The Stormwater Master Plan and 20-Year Capital Improvement Plan will be the City-Parish’s guiding resource in addressing our stormwater and drainage challenges.

Mayor Broome said she and consultant HNTB will continue to work collecting adequate data on each of the 11 watersheds throughout East Baton Rouge Parish. The massive data collection effort is being implemented into sophisticated flood risk models to simulate and test various flooding events.

“This is in an effort to understand high risk areas and create a plan of action to move our City-Parish forward, toward a future when our communities experience less flooding, our valuable property is protected and our family are friends are safe,” said Mayor Broome. “When complete, the Stormwater Master Plan will serve as a dynamic roadmap for drainage improvements and policy solutions that will make our City-Parish more resilient.”

The project is integrating 311-call system data to understand what areas of concern have been identified and what solutions can be implemented. Certain areas throughout the parish are more prone to flooding during heavy rainstorms and understanding what causes that flooding will help plan for the future.

The City-Parish is not waiting for the plan to be completed before it acts. Over the last few months, as crews have been in EBR neighborhoods across the area, the City-Parish government have been able to use the data collected to address issues in near real time. As the plan is fully developed over the coming months, we will continue to do so.

The program's website will serve as a resource of information for the public about the overall approach to developing the Stormwater master plan. 

The website contains watershed maps, planning phases, a platform to leave comments on specific areas of concerns and a sign-up for updates. This site will be a primary hub of information for this project.

The Stormwater Master Plan is one of many hazard mitigation projects currently underway. Mayor Broome instructed HNTB to identify flood risk mitigation projects throughout the parish that would provide meaningful benefit to our communities.

Over 50 projects were evaluated and the City-Parish submitted 24 applications to FEMA for consideration. 10 remain under review.

To date, $26 million has been awarded and an additional $58 million has been allocated to the City-Parish.

The current approved stormwater/drainage/flood risk reduction projects are:

-Port Hudson Pride Road Bank Stabilization along Comite River valued at $3.2 million

-Hurricane Creek Slope Paving near Plank Road valued at $1.9 million

-New bridges at Hundred Oaks & Broussard on Dawson Creek valued at $4.4 million

-Removal of channel restriction in Ward Creek at Siegen Lane valued at $1.4 million

-Box culvert replacement on Harrelson Lateral at Old Hammond Highway $1 million

-Stormwater Master Plan valued at $15 million