BRAF takes on coastal erosion

The Baton Rouge Area Foundation will seek to bring together federal and state agencies, as well as the private sector, to form a permanent consortium to deal with rising water and coastal erosion. The consortium envisioned has been tentatively called the Water Institute of the Gulf’s Delta. Putting it together will be the most complex project the foundation has ever attempted, says John Davies, BRAF president. U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu asked BRAF to get involved, and state agencies are on board, he says. The project will be expensive; Deltares, the highly regarded Dutch research institute that is consulting with BRAF, has an annual operating budget that’s well over the equivalent of $100 million, about half of which comes from the private sector. “The solutions that would come out of the Water Institute would be solutions that everybody would embrace, because they would believe the credibility of the underlying science,” Davies says. This credibility would hinge on allowing top scientists and experts who work with the nonprofit institute to make nonpolitical decisions. BRAF’s role would be to create the structure, make sure it gets launched, then back away. A physical location has not been selected, but hopes are to have a general structure designed by the end of the summer. Davies announced the project at BRAF’s annual meeting yesterday. The foundation finished last year with $620 million in assets and a $128,000 surplus in its operating budget, officials say. —David Jacobs