Growth here depends on more than oil and gas

At first glance, the St. Mary population changes don’t make sense.
Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that St. Mary Parish’s 2014 population was down 2.7 percent from the 2010 Census, numbering 53,162. St. Mary had the 10th-fastest rate of population loss among the state’s 64 parishes.
Go back just three weeks earlier, to the March 10 Berwick Town Council meeting. The council, far from panicking about population loss, felt secure enough to impose a brief moratorium on new subdivision applications while development rules are reviewed for effectiveness.
The council made clear that the moratorium doesn’t apply to two subdivisions already in the approval pipeline, offering the possibility that the town of 4,900 will soon have 70 new homes. The proposed subdivisions are Fairview, south of Fairview Drive and west of Renwick, with 59 lots, and River Bend, located in the same area with 11 lots to start.
That’s part of the story of demographic change in the Morgan City-Berwick-Patterson area. Tell somebody that the St. Mary population is falling, and the word that jumps to mind is “oil.” But growth here is also about finding land to build on, finding land for which a homeowner can afford to buy flood insurance and other factors.
Not that the energy industry, which employs about one of every nine St. Mary workers, isn’t an important factor. Berwick Mayor Louis Ratcliff recently spoke of regret that the region doesn’t have a big economic engine to go along with the energy sector.
“It’s not 100 percent oil,” Ratcliff said. “But the majority of it is. We don’t have that big medical facility like Houma or Thibodaux or Lafayette. We don’t have the university like Thibodaux.”
But Berwick has managed to grow nevertheless, picking up more than 500 new residents and increasing its population by about 11 percent between 1990 and 2010.
Schools are an important part of that growth, Ratcliff said. Louisiana Department of Education figures say Berwick High and Berwick Junior High earned A grades for 2013-14 under the state accountability system. Berwick Elementary was an A school two years ago and a B school last year.
Ratcliff also thinks young families in Morgan City, which has lost more than one of six 1990 residents, may be coming to Berwick because it’s easier to find a place where a family can grow.
But Morgan City still has hopes of being able to develop more of its land.
Developer Dean Duplantis, vice president of Hellenic LLC, said company officials are waiting for the levees to be raised and certified for flood protection before the company can begin work on a residential development in Morgan City.
One plan in the works by Consolidated Gravity Drainage District 2 is to strengthen and build levees from Siracusa east of Morgan City along Lake Palourde to intersect with the federal levee system in northwest Morgan City.
Hellenic agreed to donate rights-of-way needed to widen the levees and material needed to raise and widen the levees, Duplantis said.
After work on the Morgan City Levee Improvement Project is complete, “a development could happen,” Duplantis said. Hellenic officials met with a New Orleans developer who “may be interested in doing something with some of the property,” Duplantis said.
“We’ve also looked at taking the levee on the lakefront that intersects with Cooks and Collins Canal and the Lake Palourde lakefront and notch a section out to create about 30 acres that would be on the flood side of the levee but would front the lake,” Duplantis said.
“So you could build a marina-type development. … All the houses, obviously, would have to be elevated, but you would have access to the lake.”
The potential residential development in Morgan City is dependent on the levees getting raised and Brashear Avenue being extended to allow for that development, Duplantis said.
In the meantime, cities will have to wait for a later release of their yearly population estimates by the Census Bureau.