August 19
August 19, 2008
Edna Breaux Uzee
August 21, 2008
Staff Writer
Hurricane protection, veterans’ affairs and high gas prices dominated the town hall meeting Monday morning hosted by U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA).
Local residents and public officials filled the Terrebonne Parish government meeting room to voice their concerns.
In an oft-repeated theme, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were hammered by Vitter and the audience. The Corps has delayed and substantially increased the projected cost for the Morganza-to-the-Gulf hurricane protection system.
“Every 38 minutes, we’re losing a football field of land,” Vitter said. “We’re working very hard over the Corps’ bureaucracy. What’s most frustrating is when we actually pass something through Congress like the Morganza-to-the-Gulf authorization and the bureaucracy stymies it. That’s unacceptable.”
Local officials at the meeting, including Terrebonne Parish president Michele Claudet and state Sen. Reggie Dupre (D-Houma), complained about not receiving any of the $30 million approved in 2006 for building non-federal levees.
Instead they said, the Corps hired professors at Southern University at New Orleans to conduct environmental impact studies.
“If that had been a grant from the feds directly to the parish government, we probably would have had substantial protection with that $30 million,” Dupre said.
Dupre emphasized that there was $125 million in state and local money to construct portions of Morganza. However, that would jeopardize the federal dollars needed to complete the 72-mile system of locks, levees and other flood protection measures.
“We, as a community, have to decide very soon which direction we want to go,” Dupre said. “Do we continue pushing this issue with the Corps in designing this huge lock complex, knowing eventually that’s what we’re going to need at Morganza?”
Claudet compared the speed and cost effectiveness of the parish’s ability to build levees to that of the Corps.
“We started work on our Ward 7 levees in Chauvin in January 2006. We’re going to have 16 miles completed for $22 million,” he said.
“The federal government ended up giving the Corps $30 million. We had originally anticipated that they would do 19 miles. Now it appears that for that $30 million, they’re only going to do eight miles and that’s between the Susie Canal and Orange Street,” Claudet added.
Veterans spoke out about what they view as poor quality of treatment and services since the Veteran’s Affairs Hospital in New Orleans flooded during Hurricane Katrina.
“I believe we veterans who go to the veterans’ facilities are being used as guinea pigs because everything you go there for, they give you a prescription,” Edward Jackson said.
Jackson would like to see either the old hospital retrofitted or a new hospital built closer to Houma where many retired veterans live.
“If we had a VA hospital before Katrina, don’t you think we should have one after Katrina, instead of a Superdome,” asked Paul Chapman of Lockport.
“There is just going to be one big VA hospital in southeast Louisiana,” Vitter responded. “So I asked the VA to look at where veterans are located to meet veterans’ needs and locate it in the best place for all veterans in southeast Louisiana.”
To combat high gas prices, Vitter expressed his support for more domestic oil production. That includes opening many new areas off the Louisiana coast to exploration and drilling.
He said this would not only help wean Americans off foreign oil, but help pay for coastal erosion projects now that the state receives 37.5 percent of federal oil revenues produced off its coast.
“This is the greatest specific issue that impacts American families every week, the greatest challenge we face as a nation,” Vitter said. “We have enormous resources and we are the only country on the face of the Earth that puts a majority of it off the table. Eighty-five percent of our offshore resources, we can’t touch. That needs to change.”
