Here's a couple of little things that have been going on in the Baton Rouge area:

The community planning meeting for the BREC "X-treme Park" went X-tremely well (they had a tendency to use the word extreme a lot). The BMX riders outnumbered every other group at the meeting by about 4 to 1 which was a really good sign. The meeting was to show off the revised master plan for the Perkins Road park which will have several "X-treme" elements to it including a rock climbing area, an X-treme playground, a new BMX track, a dirt jumping area and a concrete skatepark (somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 square feet). All of this plus a couple of visual improvements to the signage and look of the entire park. There was some concern that BMX would not be allowed in the concrete park but the majority of the riders at the meeting stayed afterwards to talk to BREC officials and tell our side of the story- by the looks of it bikes will be allowed in the park.
As far as a timeline for the project goes... this is going to take a while. The bidding process for the individual construction jobs won't begin for another few months, and this process will probably take a bit of time. The BREC officials claimed that the schedule for breaking ground on the first group of projects would be sometime around the start of 2008. The skatepark is in the initial group of planned projects so hopefully by summer next year we will have a concrete skatepark here in Baton Rouge.
Also, I talked to the head of BREC (Bill Palmer) about the short notice and lack of advertising for the meeting (I only found out about it 2 days prior because Michael Allen had seen it in the newspaper). I am going to be added to the BREC Perkins Road mailing list so in the future we should have some advance notice about these sorts of meetings.

Another bit worth mentioning...
Capitol Cyclery at 5542 Jones Creek Road will be having a video premier on February 3rd at 6:15 pm for the new RideBMX DVD "Flipside". There will be free pizza at the premier and also a manual contest. The winner of the manual contest will win a full team sponsorship from Mirraco, one of the video's producers. Everyone is encouraged to get out there and practice manualing because this contest is going to be pretty cut-throat.

Here's a link to the preview for the video:
http://www.bmxonline.com/bmx/video/article/0,27679,1209767,00.html

Also, if anyone out there has pictures from any previous Savage South trips I would really like to get my hands on them. Hit me on the electronic mail so we can work something out. (bmxman187@hotmail.com)

Adios amigos