Green Articles
State may have to pay for costly river dredging
Work may add millions to coastal restoration
By Mark Schleifstein : Times-Picayune : February 14, 2008
BATON ROUGE -- A new financial snag threatens to add tens of millions of dollars to the cost of coastal restoration projects, much of which would be billed to the state, Army Corps of Engineers officials said Wednesday.
The Mississippi River Commission, the federal body that oversees use of the river and its tributaries, is insisting that the corps and the state pay for dredging the river to remove any shoaling caused by diversions built to restore the state's wetlands, Col. Al Lee, commander of the corps' New Orleans District office, said during a meeting of the Breaux Act Task Force, a federal-state panel that Lee leads.
Diversions -- essentially holes cut in river walls to allow sediment to flow back into the marsh -- also lower river levels, thus allowing more sediment to build up on the river bottom. The river commission says that will mean increased dredging costs, although no one knows how much, to keep the river navigable to shipping traffic.
Several programs involved
The corps and state have plans for building several dozen diversions of different sizes along the Mississippi, and possibly along the Atchafalaya River, which also is under the commission's control.
The projects will be built under several different programs and financing sources, including the federal Breaux Act, which is financing smaller restoration projects; the coastal impact assistance program, which is building one or two moderate-sized diversions with offshore oil revenue given to Louisiana by the federal government; the Louisiana coastal area ecosystem restoration plan, which is building several small and moderate diversions with federal and state money; and the federal-state Louisiana coastal protection and restoration study, which is under development and could include a number of diversions of different sizes.
Most of the projects will eventually be turned over to the state, which is responsible for the cost of operating and maintaining them, a cost that now could include future dredging requirements related to their operation, corps officials said.
Lee said the commission is concerned that the diversions will change the way the river acts: Less water could slow its current, allowing more sediment to fall out and cause shoals, or higher areas, on its bottom that could both disrupt shipping and increase the risk of flooding.
Passing on the increase
The shoaling would require the river to be dredged more often, he said, and that would require an increase in the corps budget to pay for dredging, which Lee said would be mandated by existing corps rules to be passed on to the restoration programs' budgets.
Corps Breaux Act program manager Melanie Goodman said a project that calls for creating a sump in the river to capture sediment continuously and pump it through pipelines to build wetlands several miles away could reduce dredging costs -- if it works, that is.
"But new projects that impact the river, if they affect our operations and maintenance requirements, those new projects would be responsible for the incremental cost increase," Goodman said. "If they result in 9 million cubic yards of sediment being deposited, the new project would have to pay the incremental cost of removing it."
Lee said the corps already is struggling to pay for dredging the river, thanks to a 7 percent reduction in maintenance money in its proposed fiscal year 2009 budget.
Trouble for Breaux Act
The result could be disastrous for the Breaux Act, which already is struggling to meet the financial demands of its first 17 years of project approvals, most of which have not yet been built.
"It could literally shut down (the Breaux Act program) 20 years before it's scheduled to expire," said Garret Graves, the state's representative on the task force and chairman of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
Graves asked Lee, half joking, whether the Mississippi River Commission should be similarly charged with the cost of alleviating the effects of its construction of levees and jetties along the river, which cut off land-building sediment from the state's coastal wetlands.
Goodman said the effects of those decisions, made a century ago, are in the past and not subject to reimbursement, just like federal and state decisions to allow oil and gas exploration in coastal wetlands, which played a key role in destroying them.
"We should go back to the oil companies and say they have to restore the damage, pay for the maintenance costs?" Goodman asked.
Lee said determining who pays future dredging costs is part of a "delicate balance" between competing users of the river, including the shipping industry and restoration projects.
He said the corps and the state will attempt to model the sediment effects of diversions during the next few months, in part to better determine how much of the dredging should be charged to the restoration projects.
Meanwhile, the task force approved more than $70 million in construction for five projects that have been under design for several years:
-- Bayou Dupont marsh creation: Sediment from the Mississippi will be pumped to fill open water east of the river in Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes near the Alliance refinery, at a cost of $25.9 million.
-- South shore of the Pen: Rock will be used to line the shoreline of this failed agricultural area that is now open water just east of Bayou Rigolettes in Jefferson, at a cost of about $8.8 million. A second half of this project, which would create 175 acres of marsh south of the shoreline at a cost of about $17 million, is expected to be paid for under a separate corps program.
-- Raccoon Island shoreline protection: New marsh would be created on the north side of this barrier island in the center of the state's coastline. More breakwaters would be added to its south side. Total cost: $9.4 million.
-- Whiskey Island back barrier marsh creation: Wetlands would be built in the center of this island just east of Raccoon Island, and a 2 1/2-mile dune with sand fencing would be built along its south shore, at a cost of $24.9 million.
-- South Lake DeCade fresh water introduction: A 1 1/2-mile-long rock revetment would be placed along the lake's shoreline, with several structures to allow fresh water to flow into the adjacent wetlands, at a cost of $3 million