47°
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
7 Day Forecast
Follow our weather team on social media

See BREC's plans for fairgrounds that prompted State Fair move

1 year 10 months 1 week ago Tuesday, May 17 2022 May 17, 2022 May 17, 2022 8:43 PM May 17, 2022 in News
Source: WBRZ

BATON ROUGE - Though it will no longer be host to the Greater Baton Rouge State Fair, BREC's Airline Highway park will soon be the home to a different attraction.

The park, which encompasses more than 100 acres, is part of BREC'S plan to give those in the southeast part of the parish more facilities.

"Land acquisition proved to be very difficult. Land of that acreage--there's not much available. It's very expensive, so the decision was made to turn Airline Highway into one of our community parks," Assistant Superintendent Reed Richard said.

The new park will include a kayak launch to Bayou Manchac, a dog park, splash pads, and an adventure playground, along with keeping the existing ball fields and air gun range.

"Lots of event space as well. Outdoor lawns, outdoor pavilions, and really designed and structured to where it's a more intuitive park. Looks a lot more like a real, state-of-the-art park."

However, some of the more important features of the new park won't be as flashy.

In 2016, Airline Highway park took on millions of gallons of water, protecting some of the nearby homes from flooding worse than they did.

BREC says the new design will make the park even more absorbent.

"It's gonna be a real game-changer. Our design for the park is for it to be intentionally flood-able and for it to, in fact, increase on that storage capacity."

The flood mitigating features include more trees, bio-swales, rain gardens and green parking lots.

BREC hopes construction can begin in 2023 and be done by 2024. You can read about more of the plans here.

More News

Desktop News

Click to open Continuous News in a sidebar that updates in real-time.
Radar
7 Days