About CPEX

The Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX) is a non-profit organization that coordinates urban, rural and regional planning efforts in Louisiana. We provide best-practice planning models, innovative policy ideas, and technical assistance to individual communities that wish to create and enact master plans dealing with transportation and infrastructure needs, equitable housing opportunities, environmental issues, and quality design for the built environment.  CPEX brings community members and leaders together and provides guidance as they work toward a shared vision for future growth and development. 

CPEX History

Neighborhood Scale Planning

CPEX’s commitment to innovation and collaboration is reflected in its unique organizational history. In 1998, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, the City of Baton Rouge and the State of Louisiana formed an unprecedented partnership to fund a downtown master plan called Plan Baton Rouge.  The office of Plan Baton Rouge, now known as CPEX, was created to implement the plan’s recommendations.

Since the plan’s inception, downtown Baton Rouge has benefited from more than $1.5 billion in private and public investment. Plan Baton Rouge has received national recognition for its success in focusing citizens and public agencies on a common goal, and has become a central force in promoting better planning citywide.

 Plan Baton Rouge Phase Two was launched in October 2008 to create an updated vision of urban design and an economic development strategy to bring better and more jobs, additional private capital and expanded public investment to the urban core of Louisiana’s capital city.

In 2005, in partnership with a new Hope VI development, Plan Baton Rouge completed a neighborhood plan for Old South Baton Rouge, a historic but disinvested community located between downtown and Louisiana State University. The plan focuses on revitalizing existing housing and businesses and integrating mixed-income housing and multi-use development to the area.

CPEX continues to oversee implementation of both efforts.

Community/Parish Scale Planning
While working on the downtown and Old South Baton Rouge community plans, Plan Baton Rouge turned its attention toward parish issues by applying for the opportunity to receive an in-kind audit of East Baton Rouge Parish’s comprehensive plan and our related ordinances. In 2004, the Smart Growth Leadership Institute and University of Southern California, funded by a grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), selected Baton Rouge as one of nine cities in the nation to receive this service. The audit examined our comprehensive plan, the Horizon Plan, to assess if this vision document promotes Smart Growth principles. The audit further assessed whether the legal ordinances contained in our Unified Development Code enable the parish to its Horizon Plan vision. With the recommendations of the audit, Baton Rouge is underway with revisions to the current codes to include new standards for development and new tools for encouraging Smart Growth.

Regional Scale Planning

In January 2006, Plan Baton Rouge transitioned into the non-profit planning agency CPEX. In the aftermath of the hurricanes, the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) created Louisiana Speaks—collaboration between the LRA, the Center for Planning Excellence and an interdisciplinary consultant team led by Calthorpe Associates—to develop a regional vision for South Louisiana.

The plan represents a model for large-scale planning. It incorporates issues from storm protection and coastal restoration to transportation, economic development and housing. The plan is based on the public involvement of 27,000 citizens and stakeholders, robust technical analysis and the unique integration of social, spatial and economic recovery and growth planning into a set of actions that provide concrete steps toward a prosperous and sustainable future for the region.  CPEX continues to play a central role in the implementation of this far-reaching plan.

While working on the Louisiana Speaks regional vision, Senator Mary Landrieu assisted CPEX in securing a grant from the EPA Smart Growth program. The grant is dedicated to helping Louisiana communities create and implement Smart Growth plans that will also support our regional vision. Under this grant, CPEX has allocated funding, staff support and other resources to parishes throughout Louisiana as they work to develop comprehensive plans that will address issues unique to our rural communities.

CPEX Today and Tomorrow
By advocating inclusive planning processes and sound, sustainable land use, transportation, economic, and environmental policy at local, regional and state levels, CPEX fills a gap in Louisiana as the single resource for communities to use to shape planning visions, decisions, practices, and policies.

CPEX continues to utilize Smart Growth Principles as a consistent conceptual framework, while it addresses present and future planning needs, and provides support to communities as they progress through each phase of development (information gathering, policy, practice and healthy sustainability).

CPEX is dedicated to one vision: Every community in Louisiana made extraordinary through planning excellence.