Posted on November 15, 2018
A plan to restore wetlands along Lake Pontchartrain from the Bonnabel Boat Launch to Bucktown in Jefferson Parish, designed to both add protection to the hurricane levee onshore and improve habitat for lake fish, will get a $400,000 planning grant from a new national coastal resilience program.
The grant includes $250,000 from the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation and $150,000 in matching funds from Jefferson Parish, which will oversee the project.
The project will extend westward the restoration of lakefront marshes already proposed as part of the Bucktown Harbor Vision Plan.
That plan is aimed at transforming the harbor and adjacent peninsula of land into a 30-acre public recreation site.
“Restoring this marsh footprint would not only increase the ecological habitat and water quality near the shore, but would be an outdoor classroom for children and adults alike to learn about the marsh and connect them to coastal issues in the parish from the lake to the Gulf of Mexico,” said a brief fact sheet that accompanied the parish’s application for the grant.
The application points out the potential of the project to reduce the effects of hurricane storm surges on the lakefront levee, which protects the northern border of the parish along the lake.
“Jefferson has been impacted by dozens of storms before Katrina, and will be by hundreds in the future,” the fact sheet said, pointing out that since 2000, the parish has been hit by more than 10 hurricanes and tropical storms.
The wetland restoration also would be aimed at what the fact sheet says was a 49 percent decline in fish production in Lake Pontchartrain between 1900 and 1980, largely due to the loss of wetlands along its edges, the result of the development of lakeshore land for residential and commercial purposes.
The lake’s fisheries also have been impacted by a decline in submerged aquatic vegetation along the southern lakefront caused by both residential development, pollution entering the lake from rainfall runoff from inside the levee sytem, and by turbid lake water resulting from the mining of the lake bottom for Rangia clam shells during much of the 20th century.
The state stopped shell dredging in the lake in 1989, and the lake’s water quality along the south shore has been steadily improving since then.
But the fact sheet points out that increasing the shoreline’s natural diversity by adding wetlands along the mile-long stretch of lakefront also is crucial to the health of the brackish lake.
Most of the $400,000 grant will be used for design and engineering work. While the parish has not yet identified a source of money for construction, there’s a good chance that both the parish’s match for this first grant and the construction funds will come from offshore oil revenue.
Starting this year, the parish will begin receiving more than $1 million a year under the federal Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which distributes 37 percent of severance taxes and fees from newly producing deepwater wells in federal waters off Louisiana’s coast to the state and 20 coastal parishes.
The project also is likely to be supported by the East Jefferson Levee District and its parent organization, the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, which now oversees the hurricane levee.
The levee district participated in a 2006 study of how best to improve the lakefront that was overseen by the Louisiana State University School of Landscape Architecture, with support from the Louisiana Sea Grant program.
That study provided several alternatives for building up protection along the levee, including a series of terraced breakwaters along the Bonnabel to Bucktown segment that would include marsh grasses, cypress trees, and picnic areas beneath live oaks at the immediate shoreline. Another alternative would include building small barrier islands planted with trees, surrounded by wetlands.
All of the proposals include boardwalks or other amenities designed to allow public access to the new wetland areas.
Source: nola
