Posted on October 12, 2017
By David J. Mitchell, The Advocate
East Ascension drainage officials agreed Monday to dredge nearly three miles of a major waterway through the heart of Gonzales and to remove two longstanding weirs thought to inhibit drainage, but held off backing another nearly $94 million in other drainage projects across the parish for at least a month.
An on-and-off topic through the years, the plan to remove the weirs and dredge New River Bayou is estimated to cost several million dollars and is among 15 projects listed on the five-year capital improvement plan the East Ascension Gravity Drainage District Board of Commissioners was expected to consider Monday.
Put on hold for now are other projects Ascension Parish drainage officials have been working on for years, so a vote of support would appear to be a formality, while other projects are newer or are dormant ideas that have received as second look after last year’s historic flood.
Among the capitol projects plan is a $5 million plan to dredge Bayou Manchac, which has been discussed before but has new, if early momentum in the past year, and a $22 million extension of Ascension’s eastern levee system.
The Laurel Ridge Levee extension, which will provide further protection to the St. Amant, Galvez and Lake areas, has been in parish plans for decades, but, in recent years, the project has come closer to reality. Most recently, it has moved into land acquisition and wetlands mitigation process and is close to receiving key federal permits, parish engineering consultants said Monday.
The capital projects plan, which extends to 2022, counts on $53.5 million in revenue from eastern Ascension’s half-cent sales tax and 5-mill property tax, both dedicated to drainage, and another $43 million in federal dollars, including $33 million in hazard mitigation money coming to the parish from the Federal Emergency Management Agency after last year’s flood.
But the drainage board did not receive the list until Monday night and decided to delay consideration until next month.
The removal of the weirs in New River is something of a revived idea from the past as well.
In the past year, the concept has been a topic of regular discussion and the board gave its initial backing to the concept of removing the weirs and dredging the bayou but left open the cost, final design of the work and any cost share from the city of Gonzales, pending an engineering report.
Unlike another weir in the Amite River which Ascension and other parishes are considering repairing, Ascension officials want the New River weirs removed.
The weirs serve as small dams that allow water to flow over them. One weir on New River Bayou is near Smith Bayou and the Legacy Oaks neighborhood and another is along Weber City Road behind the Walmart in Gonzales.
Bill Roux, the parish public works director, said the weirs were designed solely for making New River Bayou look like a river by holding up an artificially high level of water in the bayou. But Roux said sediment and other material has gotten trapped behind the weirs and also held up sediment in upstream waterways that drain into New River Bayou, including Bayou Goudine.
Roux added that weirs also inhibit the parish’s ability to drain the levels of waterways with pumping ahead of major storms and hurricanes.
“We can’t get any more out of the system unless we remove the weir. It’s constant, and it fills up with sediment so you lose storage and everything else,” Roux said.
But before the vote, one critic said removing the weir would cause fish kills, a foul smell from sewage trapped behind the weir, and ultimately flooding from the vegetation that would grow in the exposed waterway.
“You will get plenty, plenty calls from your constituents, which is probably about five or six (council) districts, about the smell and the overall effect of what we’re doing,” said Clint Cointment, a Gonzales surveyor who ran for parish president in 2015.
Cointment has previously said the parish should have pursued another, older plan that would have installed a new removable weir that could let water flow.
Cointment on Monday recommended that before the parish remove the weirs, they dredge the bayou with the water still in it to keep the odor down.
Source: The Advocate
