BATON ROUGE - On Monday, residents gathered at the Shaw Center for the Arts to listen to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and Sasaki present proposed projects for Plan Baton Rouge III, a master plan for the downtown area.

BRAF said in order for Plan Baton Rouge to be successful, it will require investment from public, private and philanthropic dollars. Proposed projects included solutions to bring people to the riverfront like a riverwalk loop which would connect the riverfront to housing and retail and also connect to the USS Kidd Veterans Museum and Shaw Center for the Arts. Another proposal included a sports complex north of the Queen Casino. A different proposal saw connectivity projects to link Mid-City to downtown.

"It definitely looks like they're going to cater to a true demographic of what the population is, from the Gumbo area with the mixed housing developments for students, for single-family homes, I'm really just excited to see what that mixed-use really looks like in our downtown," Downtown Business Owner Charles Daniel said.

Plan Baton Rouge I started in 1998. A second iteration of the plan occurred in 2008. Plan III will pick up where Plan II left off.

"We're going to have to pick what we can afford, and after the failure of the tax packages this last weekend, that's going to get harder and harder," Old State Capitol Director Mary Durusau said.

BRAF Vice President of Civic Leadership Initiatives Eric Dexter said to get the funding needed, the plan will need strong backing.

"That could be a mix of city-parish dollars, whatever that may look like. It could come in the form of tax rebates or tax incentives to give developers or investors incentives to put their development, build their project in the downtown," Dexter said. "Going all the way up to the state level and the federal level, there's a lot of grants that exist and programming that exist to help spur development in areas across the country."

Monday was the last meeting to receive feedback from residents. BRAF said the projects are to be finalized and a master plan should be released before the end of the year.