Posted on July 23, 2024
NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) – Spring and summer bring a population explosion to Louisiana’s Queen Bess Island.
Several years ago, a $20 million project rebuilt the island, increasing its size from roughly five to 37 acres.
“It was a pretty desperate situation,” said Todd Baker, Project Manager for the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. “These birds were nesting on every little branch they could find.”
The funding flow, ironically, from disaster. Fines and court settlements from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill will generate, over time, roughly $9 million for Louisiana coastal restoration.
“The funding from that oil spill gave us the opportunity to do restoration on a larger scale and expand areas like Queen Bess,” said Alisha Renfro, a coastal scientist with the National Wildlife Federation.
The money from BP and its partners funded projects that had been envisioned for years, and in some cases, decades.
For example, over the last dozen years, the state has rebuilt roughly 71 miles of barrier islands, mostly with funding from the oil settlements.
“It’s allowed us to do things that we always knew we needed to do in Louisiana, do coastal restoration at the scale that we need,” Renfro said. “So, it’s been pivotal. It’s been game-changing for our state.”
However, the oil spill dollars which today account for the vast majority of coastal spending, will run out in the year 2032.
Simone Maloz, Campaign Director for Restore the Mississippi River Delta, is among those scrambling to find a means of replacing the money.
“I don’t think there’s one silver bullet,” Maloz said.
One possible source of funding, increasing Louisiana’s share of federal offshore royalties from oil and gas wells, will, quite literally, take an act of Congress.
Under current law, the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA), Louisiana receives roughly one third of the royalties produced from wells in federal waters off its coast.
Funds for Louisiana through GOMESA (per CPRA):
- 2018: $82.8 million
- 2019: $94.7 million
- 2020: $155.7 million
- 2021: $109.9 million
- 2022: $111.8 million
- 2023 $156.1 million
- 2024: $156.3 million
“For us in Louisiana, it’s life or death that we restore the coast,” said House Minority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, who has pushed to split the funding 50-50. Scalise’s plan, which the Republican-led House passed last year, would also remove the $500 million cap placed on how much money can flow to oil-producing states along the Gulf.
The plan has stalled in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where there is less appetite for oil and gas drilling given climate change concerns.
While Scalise is a staunch ally of the oil industry, his plan would also create a framework for sharing proceeds from future wind farms in the Gulf.
“I want all forms of energy to be produced, but I also want the revenue sharing that would go with it for the states that produce that energy,” Scalise said.
Coastal advocates concede they often struggle to convince lawmakers from other parts of the country about Louisiana’s needs, especially in light of the billions of dollars that flowed to the state in the aftermath of the oil spill and following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Maloz uses a “pay me now” or “pay me later” argument, pointing to bayou communities where taxpayers put up their own money to build better levees.
The South Lafourche levee system, built almost entirely with local money, prevented catastrophic flooding in Hurricane Ida in 2019.
“Which meant we did not have to go the federal government and ask for disaster recovery,” Maloz said.
Advocates argue Louisiana will need additional resources in the future to adequately maintain levees, including the $14.6 billion Hurricane Risk Reduction System built around New Orleans following Katrina.
“There’s no way Louisiana can go back to a coastal program of the 1990s,” Maloz said.
