The parish Mosquito Abatement and Rodent Control board will meet later today to discuss a $605,000 federal grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that, apparently, is still available for the agency to use to purchase a tire shredder.
MARC officials assumed the grant, which the CDC awarded in 2019 to the MARC through the Louisiana Department of Health, was lost after the parish failed to spend the money procuring the tire shredder before a Sept. 1, 2020, deadline.
The deadline to spend the grant money was originally June 1 but was extended because of the pandemic.
Late Thursday, a spokesperson for LDH said the state received confirmation from the CDC that the funding is still available to purchase the shredder, which is an attractive concept to both the state and federal health agencies because of its potential to eliminate waste tires that serve as breeding pools for mosquitoes.
But LDS spokesperson Ally Neel also says the state has the authority from the feds to redirect the money to address some other mosquito-related need, adding “we have not chosen to redirect it, yet.”
It is unclear what might cause the state to redirect the money or when it might decide to do so.
What is clear is that the controversy over the tire shredder has become something of a political football, with Metro Council member and mayoral candidate Matt Watson blaming Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s administration for the delays that have threatened the status of the funds, and various city and state agencies all pointing fingers at one another.
Watson was an early advocate of the program because waste tires have created blight throughout the parish. Several months ago, he identified a private contractor, Baum Environmental, to partner with the city-parish and helped broker a deal between them.
But the Metro Council, not the Broome administration, was the one to block the deal, when it nixed the location the MARC had originally planned for the shredder—a site of MARC-owned property near the airport—that Council member Chauna Banks opposed on the grounds of environmental racism.
Subsequent efforts to find a new location proved difficult, though Baum Environmental in recent weeks found a site and reportedly agreed to acquire it and lease it to the city-parish for a nominal fee.
The council has not approved that amendment to its deal with Baum.
It is unclear what action, if any, the MARC board will take when it meets at 12:30 today at MARC headquarters.
MARC Executive Director Randy Vaeth could not be reached for comment, but Chief Administrative Officer Darryl Gissel says the administration is relieved the money is still available for the project.
“We are glad this has been clarified,” he says.
