The Advocate (LA)

April 26, 2009
Author: Ellyn Couvillion
email: ecouvillion@theadvocate.com
Section: Business
Article Text:

Growing Communities

In the early days of his landscape architecture business in Alexandria, Patrick Moore would sometimes find himself sipping coffee in the home of a wealthy client, discussing what types of daylilies could be planted that would match the draperies

“I couldn’t do that” type of work for very long, Moore said.

He and his wife and business partner, Randalle Moore, wanted work that would benefit more people, communities.

Both landscape architects — Patrick of LSU and Randalle of California Polytechnic State University — the couple, over time, turned their company in the direction they wanted it to go.

At some point, “We quit doing private estates cold turkey,” Patrick said.

Today, Moore Planning Group, landscape architects and site planners, has 13 Louisiana cities, five towns and three parishes among its clients.

“We grew up as landscape architects,” Moore said.

“We morphed into planners … our clients kept pushing us to be here,” he said.

Two of the company’s current clients are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of their histories. Central became a city in 2005 and is taking its early steps in planning, and Plaquemine, incorporated in 1838, wants to preserve and highlight its history.

“I hired them when we first became a city,” Central Mayor Mac Watts said.

“Central is very rural and needs to be developed from the ground up,” said Watts.

“We have one chance to do this right in Central … We want to keep our country atmosphere” and avoid urban sprawl, he said.

“I wanted to keep it in the state, (with) someone who knows the makeup (of the area), the people. He fit in with all that,” Watts said of Patrick Moore, who, he said, was recommended to him by other mayors in Louisiana.

Moore Planning Group has completed Phase 1 of its planning for Central, an interim land-use plan, Watts said.

“If you could change the name of Central, it would be ‘Sanctuary,’” said Moore.

It’s a word, he said, that came up often when Moore Planning Group staffers met with residents.

More than once, they heard from Central residents, “‘This is our sanctuary. We can hear the birds, see horses, big trees,’” Moore said.

In Plaquemine, after the first planner moved out of state, the Moore Planning Group came in on the next phases of the city’s Waterfront Park project, a three-acre public park with a wooden boardwalk, pavilions and floating boating piers, on Bayou Plaquemine in the city’s downtown.

After the park was completed in 2006, downtown Plaquemine attracted the first hotel in Iberville Parish since the 1930s, the Best Western Plaquemine Inn, which opened the following year, said Kristine Hebert, special projects coordinator and Main Street program manager in Plaquemine.

Moore Planning Group is involved in other, related projects in Plaquemine, which will include the transformation of a vacant foundry building near the park into an open-air plaza, Hebert said.

“We’ve learned that landscaping and parks and those concepts are basically new for municipal governments,” especially in rural communities, she said.

Local leaders have seen they “do have to look at these communities in a more broad way and not just at services,” she said.

Moore said every great town should have a town square, but many cities don’t have them anymore.

“Plaquemine was looking for a town square — this is what the park has become,” he said.

Since 2003, Moore Planning Group has designed plans for Alexandria, Pineville, Lake Charles, Crowley, Iberville Parish and Avoyelles Parish.

As a young man out of college, Moore was on the phone at his parents’ home in Alexandria, thinking he was going to accept an out-of-state job offer, when he found himself turning it down.

“I wanted to stay in Louisiana and make it a better place,” Moore said.

Instead of leaving the state, he talked his way into getting hired at a Baton Rouge landscape architecture firm then operating, Henslee, Thomas and Cox.

“I said ‘Hire me … for three months.’ Two years later, I was managing the company,” Moore said.

“That was a great group of guys. I got taught by the best,” he said.

Patrick and Randalle married and opened their firm in Alexandria, all in the same week in 1982.

Patrick said he can remember when he and his wife hired their first employee the following year, a big step for them, he said.

Today, Moore Planning Group numbers a staff of 15, among them the Moore’s son, Travis, a landscape architect, and their daughter, Hannah, a mass communications and international business graduate.

In addition to community planning and landscape architecture, the company, which opened an office in downtown Baton Rouge in 2007, also offers strategic implementation of plans; project and program management; and economic and resource development.

Moore Planning Group, since 2003, “has helped clients find more than $40 million in public and private resources to help get their plans off the ground,” according to company literature.

Working with a number of Louisiana communities in recent years has felt like a “coming to fruition, the reason we stayed here,” Randalle Moore said.

“We certainly made a conscious effort to stay in Louisiana,” she said.

Randalle, a native of New England who grew up in New Jersey and California, said she’s come to love her adopted state of Louisiana.

“I treasure the number of generations of families who live here,” she said.

She appreciates the “ability of being able to make an impact on growing communities” through her work, she said.

The Moores feel their background as landscape architects has given their outlook as planners a different edge.

“We come from a background of the earth,” Patrick said.

“Anything that’s worth anything comes out of the dirt … the natural resources that God gave us,” he said.

“It’s a vocation for us,” he said of he and his wife. He credits his staff with the same kind of dedication.

“Everybody is our office is so committed to making the world a better place,” Moore said.

In March, Moore Planning Group was awarded a Merit Award by the Louisiana Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects for its master plan for the city of Ridgeland, Miss.

In 2003, Patrick Moore won a Small Business Person of the Year Award, for District 6, from the Louisiana Department of Economic Development.

Moore said he received the award, in large part, for hiring native Louisianans, who were working outside the state and wanted to return home.

“I love moving people home,” Moore said.