NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana on Thursday canceled a $3 billion repair of disappearing Gulf coastline, funded by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement, scrapping what conservationists called an urgent response to climate change but Gov. Jeff Landry viewed as a threat to the state’s way of life.
Despite years of studies and reviews, the project at the center of Louisiana's coastal protection plans grew increasingly imperiled after Landry, a Republican, took office last year. Its collapse means that the state could lose out on more than $1.5 billion in unspent funds and may even have to repay the $618 million it already used to begin building.
The Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group, a mix of federal agencies overseeing the settlement funds, said that "unused project funds will be available for future Deepwater Horizon restoration activities” but would require review and approval.
A plan to rebuild disappearing land
The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project aimed to rebuild upward of 20 square miles (32 kilometers) of land over a 50-year period in southeast Louisiana to combat sea level rise and erosion on the Gulf Coast. When construction stalled last year because of lawsuits, trustees warned that the state would have to return the hundreds of millions of dollars it had already spent if the project did not move forward.
Former Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves, a Republican who once led the state's coastal restoration agency, said that killing the project was “a boneheaded decision" not rooted in science.
“It is going to result in one of the largest setbacks for our coast and the protection of our communities in decades,” Graves said. “I don't know what chiropractor or palm reader they got advice from on this, but — baffling that someone thought this was a good idea.”
Project supporters stressed that it would have provided a data-driven, large-scale solution to mitigate the worst effects of an eroding coastline in a state where a football field of land is lost every 100 minutes and more than 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers) of land have vanished over the past century, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The project, which broke ground in 2023, would have diverted sediment-laden water from the Mississippi River to restore wetlands disappearing because of a range of factors including climate-change-induced sea level rise and a vast river levee system that choked off natural land regeneration from sediment deposits.
“The science has not changed, nor has the need for urgent action,” said Kim Reyher, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. “What has changed is the political landscape.”
The Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group last year had noted that "no other single restoration project has been planned and studied as extensively over the past decades.”
A perceived threat to Louisiana culture
While the project had largely received bipartisan support and was championed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, his successor has been a vocal opponent. Landry recoiled at the rising price tag and amplified concerns that the massive influx of freshwater would devastate local fisheries.
Landry has said the project would “break” Louisiana’s culture of shrimp and oyster harvesting and compared it to government efforts a century ago to punish schoolchildren for speaking Cajun French.
“We fought this battle a long time, but Gov. Landry is the reason we won this battle," said Mitch Jurisich, who chairs the Louisiana Oyster Task Force and sued the state over the project's environmental impacts, including likely killing thousands of bottlenose dolphins due to the onslaught of freshwater.
Landry said in a statement that the project is “no longer financially or practically viable," noting that the cost has doubled since 2016.
“This level of spending is unsustainable,” Landry said. The project also “threatens Louisiana's seafood industry, our coastal culture, and the livelihoods of our fishermen — people who have sustained our state for generations.”
The project's budget had included more than $400 million for mitigating the costs to local communities, including to help the oyster industry build new oyster beds. Project proponents said that the rapid loss of coast meant communities would be displaced anyway if the state failed to take action to protect them.
“You either move oysters or move people, and there's only one answer to that question," Graves said.
State seeks a smaller, cheaper solution
Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the lead agency overseeing the project, said in a statement that the project was “no longer viable at this time based on a totality of the circumstances" including costs, litigation and a federal permit suspended earlier this year after the state halted work on the project.
Chairman Gordon “Gordy” Dove said that “our commitment to coastal restoration has not wavered" and plans to pursue a smaller-scale diversion nearby. Dove told lawmakers earlier this year that the state could save at least $1 billion with a different plan to channel river water into the Gulf Coast at a rate 5 to 30 times less than the Mid-Barataria project's 75,000 cubic feet per second.
Conservation groups bristled at the change in plans. The Mid-Barataria project's termination marked “a complete abandonment of science-driven decision-making and public transparency,” Restore the Mississippi River Delta, a coalition of environmental groups, said in a statement, adding that the state was “throwing away” money intended to protect its coastal residents and economy.
The coalition said alternative measures proposed by the state, such as the smaller-scale diversion or rebuilding land by dredging, were insufficient to meaningfully combat land loss and did not undergo the same level of scientific vetting as the Mid-Barataria project.
“A stopgap project with no data is not a solution," the coalition said. “We need diversion designs backed by science — not politics.”
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Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Jack Brook, The Associated Press
