The Louisiana Watershed Initiative—a program involving five state agencies focused on watershed management—wraps up a months-long, statewide listening tour Thursday with a meeting in Baton Rouge involving public works officials, local planners and elected officials.
The information that comes out of the meeting—as well as the feedback that has come from other stops on the tour—is significant because it will help determine how the state allocates some $1.2 billion in federal flood control money that was awarded in April but has yet to make its way to Louisiana.
Casey Tingle, deputy director of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, says the state is still waiting on the federal government to issue the federal register notice—a set of detailed rules outlining how the flood mitigation and resilience dollars, which are coming from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the form of Community Development Block Grants, can be spent.
In the meantime, Gov. John Bel Edwards created a Watershed Council comprising five agencies—the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, Department of Transportation and Development, Office of Community Development, Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and GOHSEP—that will administer the program. In August, the council launched the Watershed Initiative and its statewide tour, designed to get input from communities in all 57 of the state’s watersheds about what their needs and ways communities can work together.
“Obviously, we’re looking at mitigation projects and where the $1.2 billion needs to go,” Tingle says. “But we’re also looking at how we create a capacity so across the state we have more consistency and the ability to address these issues and make good decisions.”
Local watershed management studies, like the one currently underway in East Baton Rouge Parish by engineering firm HNTB, do not duplicate what is going on at the state level but helps better inform state efforts, he says.
Though HUD has not said when it will release the regulations governing the $1.2 billion, Tingle says his office is hoping it will be some time in December, which could mean funds would be available to spend on projects by the spring.
One outstanding is whether HUD will restrict spending to areas that were impacted by the March and August floods of 2016 or whether they can be spent anywhere in the state.
“There’s a lot of interest in that,” he says.
