Louisiana is set to receive $1.2 billion in federal flood control money—with Baton Rouge engineering and constructing firms are poised to get a piece of the pie—as work on the long-stalled Comite Diversion Canal project is likely among the major projects to be funded through the federal block grants.
But more than a month after the $1.2 billion allocations was announced jointly by Gov. John Bel Edwards and U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, who played a key role in securing the funds, there’s no word on how the state will determine which projects get funded, how much each project will receive or the timeline for parsing out those funds and getting the projects moving.
While local contractors anxiously await details, the director of the state agency that will administer the funds—the Office of Community Development—says it will likely be at least a couple of months before state officials have any idea which projects are even eligible for the funds.
That’s largely because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is distributing the money in the form of Community Development Block Grants, has yet to issue its rules for the allocations. What’s more, before HUD releases the rules related to flood mitigation projects it is expected to first release rules governing the allocation of a larger $28 billion pot of funds that will go to rebuilding communities hit hard by 2017 hurricanes.
“All they’ve told us is they’re going to release the federal register notice for the unmet needs first—that’s the stuff for Puerto Rico and Texas relative to housing so we’re not eligible for that,” OCD Director Pat Forbes says. “We don’t know how long it will be before we get rules governing the $1.2 billion for resilience and mitigation projects.”
While OCD waits, Forbes say his department is doing a lot of work behind the scenes, meeting regularly with representatives from several other state agencies including the Department of Transportation and Development, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority and the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to gather data and identify projects that could be eligible for funding. The state is hoping a separate federal allocation to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will pick up a lot of the tab for the Comite Diversion project, which would free up more of the HUD money for other smaller projects throughout the state.
“We don’t want to let any more time than necessary pass before we start reducing the risk around the state, so we’ll be looking for projects that are no-brainers, which is to say you don’t really need a model to know that snagging and clearing a waterway will be helpful and is a smart thing to do,” he says. “So we’re going to be looking for projects we can do right off the bat. OCD and the other state agencies are also concentrating on projects that affect regional watersheds, of which there are 57 around the state. These projects cross parish lines and are very often regional in nature so projects that are already underway involving multiple parish stakeholders—like regional planning efforts around the Teche-Vermillion watershed in the Acadiana region, for instance—will likely be high on the list.
“Acadiana is working together as a region so we’re going to be improving and expanding that model around the state to work with local folks on a watershed basis to make smart decisions,” Forbes says.
Who will oversee OCD and its administration of the funds? Forbes says that will fall to the Legislature and HUD.
“The Legislature has asked us to report to Joint Legislative Budget Committee and on action plans and at the federal level HUD monitors everything we do,” he says.
