Louisiana cancels $3B coastal repair funded by oil spill settlement

Summary

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 landThe 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 ...