$1.25M budgeted for Bayou Chene flood work

The St. Mary Levee District board introduced its proposed $3.46 million 2015 budget Thursday, which includes $1.25 million to go toward the Bayou Chene Flood Protection project.
The commission held its monthly meeting at the St. Mary Parish Courthouse.
The levee district’s original 2014 budget contained about $4.68 million in expenditures, but the projected actual 2014 expenditures is expected to finish at $1.13 million, according to a levee district report.
By the end of the year, about $250,000 will have been spent on the Bayou Chene project, the report stated.
The district projects to have a fund balance of $6.76 million at the end of 2015, St. Mary Levee District Executive Director Tim Matte said in his budget message.
The proposed budget will go through a public hearing and be up for adoption at the Dec. 11 meeting.
Engineer Jeff Pena of CB&I said engineers are ready to start final design of the estimated $80 million Bayou Chene Flood Protection project once they get comments back from various agencies on the preliminary design.
The project, which is located south of the McDermott Yard in Amelia, will consist of a permanent structure that will block Bayou Chene so that flood waters cannot travel from Bayou Chene through Bayou Boeuf to Lake Palourde. The project will protect St. Mary, Terrebonne, Lafourche, Assumption, St. Martin, and Iberia parishes.
After Wednesday’s Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority meeting, the St. Mary Levee District appears to be on the Restore Act funding list, but have not yet been put into a “bucket,” which is where the money is, St. Mary Levee District Commission President Bill Hidalgo said.
The Restore Act is federal legislation that provides for the disbursement of BP Oil liability funds that will come to the federal government.
The Bayou Chene project might be able to get funding from the Restore Act, Hidalgo said.
“We’ve talked about incorporating some strategies to try and make sure that we move ourselves into a funding bucket,” Matte said.
Also at the meeting, the commission adopted a resolution opposing the proposed expansion of federal control by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ regulatory authority under the Clean Water Act. Hidalgo said that expansion called “The Waters of the U.S.” is an onerous effort to say the least for the EPA and corps to get deeper and deeper into controlling the waters of the U.S. beyond what they currently do.
“Some people talk about that if you’re going to have a ditch in front of your house, in order to clean the ditch, you’re going to have to get a permit,” Hidalgo said. “I mean that’s taking it a little bit far.”
Saying that every ditch and canal would need a permit for work might be an exaggeration as to what would actually happen, Hidalgo said. “But we don’t need any more regulation,” he said.
The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, St. Mary Parish government, the Association of Levee Boards of Louisiana and Coastal Louisiana Levee Consortium have all passed resolutions opposing the expansion, Hidalgo said.