Posted on November 22, 2016
By Mark Schleifstein, NOLA.com
Kristi Trail, a Metairie native and environmental engineer, has been named the new executive director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation. The foundation announced her hiring Wednesday (Nov. 16.)
“Kristi is the perfect choice to continue LPBF’s successful programs and steer the organization into the future,” said Carlton Dufrechou, a foundation board member who served as the organization’s executive director before becoming general manager of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway Commission in 2009.
“When you put your toes in it, it’s going to feel good.”
Trail succeeds Dwight Williams, who has served as the foundation’s interim executive director for two years. Williams will now oversee the foundation’s New Canal Lighthouse Museum and Education Center and the restoration of Pontchartrain Beach.
“I am over the moon excited for having this position,” Trail said. “I grew up on the lake, spent my whole life there.”
Trail said her first goal is to find ways of getting the public to return to the lake, to take advantage of “all the fruits of our success.” Those include dramatic improvements in water quality in the lake and in streams, especially on the North Shore, that feed the lake.
The foundation’s first success was getting the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to ban dredging of Rangia clam shells from the lake’s bottom in 1990. Dredging left the lake’s water cloudy during most of the year, which dramatically reduced the ability of those clams to colonize the lake bottom and limited the growth of submerged aquatic vegetation throughout the lake.
Too, the foundation worked with dairy farmers in Tangipahoa and St. Tammany parishes to reduce the flow of bacteriological contamination and nutrients from their operations into bayous and streams during the past 25 years. The result is that many locations around the lake and on those streams have been reclassified as safe for recreational use.
The plan would cater to motorized and non-motorized boats and include a large swimming beach.
Trail said she also will be move forward with the foundation’s plans to reopen Pontchartrain Beach, on the lakefront north of the University of New Orleans, to public swimming. The foundation is in the midst of obtaining the permits necessary to place 17,000 tons of sand on the beachfront, she said.
She said the foundation also will continue to partner with the Environmental Defense Fund, National Wildlife Federation, National Audubon Society and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana in the Restore the Mississippi River Delta Coalition. The umbrella group is helping state officials plan and develop coastal restoration projects.
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Trail is a graduate of Metairie Park Country Day School. She holds a bachelor and master of science degrees in civil engineering from Louisiana State University.
Before joining the foundation, she worked for 1 1/2 years as an environmental engineer for Ultra Consulting in Norco, handling permitting and compliance consulting services. She worked as an engineer for Shell Oil Co. from June 2002 until November 2015 in a variety of management positions. Before that, she worked for the Williams Co. as an engineer for two years and for ERM as an environmental engineer for two years.
She’s also served as vice president of the board of directors of Parkway Partners since 2012. She’s on the board of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, Audubon Area Zoning Association and the LSU Health Foundation of New Orleans.
Source: NOLA
