CWPPRA nominates 18 area coastal projects

Eight coastal projects from the Barataria and Terrebonne basins were among the 18 nominated for further evaluation as the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act process to determine priority projects moves forward.

CWPPRA was born 24 years ago from federal legislation to aid coastal restoration in Louisiana. One of its primary tasks is to select on an annual basis four priority projects, which then receive federal and state money for at least completion of project design. Nominated projects were announced Feb. 25.

“The CWPPRA program has definitely kept coastal restoration moving forward the past couple of decades,” said Nicholas Matherne, director of Terrebonne Parish’s Office of Coastal Restoration and Preservation. “The projects are never the size and scale we really need them to be in coastal Louisiana, but they’re better than just sitting on our hands and waiting for money to start falling from the sky. We’re still doing a lot of really good work in a lot of very desperately needed areas of the coast.”

The eight local projects to move on in the voting process are (sorted by voting total):

– Bayou Dupont Sediment Delivery – Marsh Creation 4 (Barataria)

– East Catfish Lake Marsh Creation and Terracing (Terrebonne)

– West Fourchon Marsh Creation and Marsh Nourishment (Terrebonne)

– Lake Felicity Oyster Reef Shoreline Protection and Marsh Creation (Terrebonne)

– Bayou Dularge Ridge Restoration and Marsh Creation (Terrebonne)

– Barataria Bay Waterway East Marsh Creation

– East Leeville Marsh Creation and Nourishment (Barataria)

– Grand Bayou Marsh Creation and Terracing (Barataria)

No projects from the Atchafalaya Basin were nominated because the area is currently producing a net gain in land.

CWPPRA’s task force – comprised of six state and federal agencies – will whittle the candidate list down on April 15 to 10 projects, which will be further scrutinized over the summer for environmental and engineering practicality, and to better assess cost-benefit ratios. The final four projects will be designated Dec. 11.

Lafourche Parish Government will likely support the East Leeville Marsh Creation project, parish administrator Archie Chaisson III said on Monday.

The project proposes creating and maintaining more than 400 acres of marsh east of Bayou Lafourche, around Leeville. It would protect the surface-level segment of La. Highway 1 located outside of the south Lafourche ring levee system.

Chaisson said he intends to submit desired markups to the proposal that would gear it further north to protect a greater portion of the vulnerable Highway 1.

“That’s really where the work needs to go because as much as we want to see that elevated portion of Highway 1 come to be, we don’t know how soon that’s going to happen,” Chaisson said.

While urging the Lafourche administration to support the project last week, Launch Leeville’s Janet Rhodus said she has secured written support from various state and federal lawmakers. Rhodus formally presented the project before the CWPPRA stakeholders last month.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which presented the project last year, has signed on as its federal sponsor. Including design and construction, the project’s cost is estimated to range from $35-40 million, according to a NOAA fact sheet.

Lafourche also prioritized during the nomination process the Barataria Bay Waterway East Marsh Creation, estimated at a cost of $29.2 million. The project would create 241 acres of marsh.

Terrebonne Parish Consolidated Government intends to continue supporting the Lake Felicity Oyster Reef and Bayou Dularge Ridge Restoration projects, which they ranked one and two during the nominating process, Matherne said.

Lake Felicity, at an estimated cost of less than $20 million, would protect 85 acres of productive natural marsh by creating and nourishing an additional 142 acres, according to a fact sheet.

The Bayou Dularge project is estimated to cost between $20-25 million in creating and nourishing roughly 556 acres of marsh. It would protect the Bayou Dularge Ridge surrounding Grand Pass that was prioritized in the state’s coastal master plan.

“We’re very happy that they’re making it through to the summer sessions to be evaluated further by the engineering and environmental working groups,” Matherne said.

Local governments voted as part of the nomination process, but the CWPPRA task force and its technical committee will trim the list at each step moving forward. The East Leeville project was third on Lafourche’s prioritized list, behind a project at Caminada and one further north along eastern Bayou Lafourche, and the top one to make it through the nomination process.

CWPPRA is designed to facilitate 75-25 federal-state funding shares for PPL-authorized costs. Each project must have a federal sponsor, and state dollars are contributed to one-quarter of the costs.

Selected priority projects are initially only authorized for design funding. After the project is designed, stakeholders can request construction funding, but the CWPRRA task force typically re-evaluates the project prior to granting that funding. Usually one or two of the projects authorized for design each year receive construction monies.

The CWPPRA task force includes the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA), the National Resources Conservation Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

CWPPRA’s process to select coastal projects will likely be a model for how oil-and-gas leasing revenues are disbursed through the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act when its second phase begins in 2017, Matherne said.

The legislation guiding CWPRRA is set to expire in 2019. Chaisson and Matherne said local officials would lobby to reauthorize the program.