BATON ROUGE - The city-parish held a meeting Thursday afternoon for Garden District residents to hear about ideas to relieve the neighborhood's flooding. 

“There’s some significant flooding issues in the area. Right here on Cherokee, it's especially bad. I’ve definitely had to take like a 15-minute detour sometimes just to get to my house on Oleander, just because I couldn't access my house coming from this way down Park,” said Garden District resident Alyssa Fitzsimmons. 

Fred Raiford is the parish drainage director, and he says they’ve been looking into the area's problems. 

“We have a lot of physical data that we have collected. There’s some additional information that I told the group that we will be collecting next week to try to finalize some issues on how we are going to potentially address some of those concerns,” Raiford said.

From that data, they’ve already started coming up with ideas and possible solutions, such as adding more inlets, also known as storm drains.

“... We may need to look at adding some additional inlets to get some of the water off the street quicker and get it to the drain pipes where it’s supposed to be going to,” Raiford explained.

Even though the flooding problems in the Garden District are bad, Raiford says they aren't the only people dealing with lots of water.

“I have many subdivisions just like this, and you know, I’ve got to be very careful that I don’t look like I’m just doing this for one or two subdivisions, when I'm actually looking at it for the whole parish,” Raiford said. 

The city-parish says they hope to finalize a plan to address the situation by next week.