Louisiana’s governor raises major doubts about a stalled $3 billion coastal restoration project

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry raised serious objections Thursday to a $3 billion project long hailed as key to restoring the state’s eroding coastline, decrying the growing cost and predicting dire harm to a coastal culture dependent on fishing, shrimping and oyster dredging.

The Republican governor’s remarks to a Senate committee in Baton Rouge were his most extensive — and most decisively negative — on the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project since he took office in January. They come a month after federal authorities warned that money for the project channeled to the state by the federal government would have to be returned if the state could not provide a clear commitment to the plan.

Landry stopped short of calling for an end to the project altogether but said a compromise must be reached with opponents of the project. The chair of the Senate Committee, Republican Sen. Pat Connick, said lawmakers would have to weigh the next move.

The project would channel 75,000 cubic feet (2,100 cubic meters) of sediment per second from the Mississippi River into the nearby Barataria Basin in southeast Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish to create between 20 to 40 square miles (52 to 104 square kilometers) of new land over five decades.

It has drawn opposition from some in Plaquemines Parish and now Landry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said, likening the projected damage to shrimp and oyster harvesters to the diminishing of the Cajun French language generations ago when southwest Louisiana school children were forced to speak nothing but English.

Ground was broken on the project in August 2023, but state and federal litigation by various interests has stalled it. Landry’s remarks added to doubts about its future, despite support from environmental groups.

Supporters of the project, which is being funded from a settlement arising from BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, quickly pushed back during and after Landry’s committee testimony.

“I really think, again, the proper course of action is to remain and build as properly permitted as already funded with BP oil spill dollars … Every day that we wait and delay we’re costing the state more money,” Rep. Joseph Orgeron, a Republican from Cut Off, told Landry.

While Landry called the project experimental, Orgeron said other, smaller diversion projects have worked.

“As we continue to lose wetlands to open water, that’s just less and less breeding grounds, less and less protection for all of our juvenile shrimp, crab, finfish, you name it,” Corey Miller, community engagement director with the nonprofit Pontchartrain Conservancy, said in an interview. “We have to figure out a way to reestablish that connection between the river and our estuaries in order to rebuild deltas to protect all of our communities.”

The project was planned in response to a rapidly vanishing coastline caused by a variety of natural and man-made factors. Those include land subsidence, sea-level rise, the cutting of canals through coastal wetlands by oil and gas companies, and the artificial control of the Mississippi River via levee systems that protect populations from floods but also prevent the natural flow of water that would ordinarily deposit sediment and rebuild land.

The conservation group Restore the Mississippi River Delta said Landry’s remarks represent a “dramatic shift” in coastal restoration efforts: “Not building this project as designed, permitted and funded will put citizens and businesses at increased risk from future storms.”

Landry said delays have pushed the Mid-Barataria project cost over the years from around $1.5 billion to more than $3 billion, and he predicted costs above $2.9 billion will have to be passed on to Louisiana taxpayers.

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Associated Press reporter Jack Brook in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, contributed to this story.