From the Editor: Christmas wishes for St. Mary

If Santa leaves a lump of coal in your stocking, does he have to mitigate for his expanded carbon footprint?
It would be a drag if the Environmental Protection Agency forced jolly ol’ St. Nick to plant 75 scrubby pine trees and create 10 acres of wetlands because, after checking the list twice, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that you were, in fact, naughty.
But if we’re good, could Santa bring us a 70-mile stretch of interstate? Or a new levee system? Could he please, please, please figure out how to strike a balance that allows affordable energy that doesn’t bankrupt the companies producing it and the governments that rely on industry taxes?
Maybe those elves could take a whack at the state budget.
Those are the items on the Christmas wish list for St. Mary Parish:
—Progress on Interstate 49 South. You can hear a dozen different reasons why upgrading U.S. 90 to interstate standards from I-10 to the West Bank (in New Orleans, not the Middle East) makes sense. Controlled access would make hurricane evacuation quicker. The energy-related businesses along U.S. 90 would be able to ship heavy equipment to wherever more easily. We’d have a no-fooling NAFTA highway from the Gulf all the way to Canada.
But the best reason is that U.S. 90 is, statistically speaking, dangerous.
From January 2004 to December 2014, 122 fatal crashes killed 133 people in St. Mary, according to our analysis of federal Fatal Accident Reporting System data. Fifty-five of those crashes, five a year or 45 percent of the total, were identified as having happened on U.S. 90. That may be an understatement because it’s not clear how FARS characterizes crashes on cross-overs, intersecting roads, frontage roads and ramps.
You might react with a hearty “duh!” U.S. 90 is the parish’s major land transportation route, so it stands to reason that it will have a major share of the vehicle crashes. But you can run the numbers in Lafayette Parish, which has I-10 and other high-traffic routes besides U.S. 90, and you’ll see a similar pattern.
Interstate standards mean controlled access — no more railroad crossings, cross-overs and stoplights. The focus of I-49 South efforts now is the Lafayette portion, the most expensive remaining piece. Let’s hope the feds, who will end up providing the bulk of the money, don’t forget about St. Mary.
—Energy stability. I buy gasoline for a 134-mile daily round-trip commute, so it's killing me to say this. But as long as we're running a country on hydrocarbons, we're going to need energy prices sufficient to support the energy industry. That industry is going to find it difficult to survive with oil below $40 a barrel and natural gas at less than $2 per thousand cubic feet.
That’s especially true because the largest sources of potential production seem to be shale deposits and the oil beneath deep Gulf waters. Both sources require techniques and technology that are more expensive than just poking a hole in the ground.
Meanwhile, OPEC has decided that if we're going to produce ourselves into bankruptcy, they’ll do the same. So those countries won’t save us from ourselves.
What are you going to do about this one, Santa?
—Work on an improved levee system is underway in Morgan City. It’s one of those nerdy things that aren’t very sexy, but it’s important for the city. Without flood protection that's up to federal snuff, builders and homeowners may face prohibitively expensive flood insurance requirements, such as raising homes in the most vulnerable areas.
If we want the city to grow, we need solid flood protection.
—We have a new parish president in David Hanagriff, a new legislator in state Rep.-elect Beryl Adams Amedee, and a new governor in John Bel Edwards.
All will have to grapple in one way or another with the impact of low energy prices. In St. Mary, sales tax receipts have been down for a solid year and unemployment has risen to 8 percent to 6.8 percent over roughly the same period — a period that coincides with the slump in oil prices.
Louisiana, despite the cuts in higher education spending and the attempts to privatize public hospitals that marked the Jindal administration, is still checking the seat cushions for loose change every year. And sooner or later, you run out of seat cushions.
Oil prices are part of the problem, no doubt. But Louisiana was forced to go budget-scrubbing even when oil was as high as it’s ever been.
What we may need here, Santa, is a whole new budget and taxation system. This one isn’t working, in good times or bad.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.