Posted on October 17, 2025
It’s October 7, 2025, and Rep. Clay Higgins is not amused. Donning a pair of tinted glasses, a Bluetooth earpiece and an “Israel Defense Forces” baseball hat, the congressman stands on a strip of grass next to the Coulee Ile des Cannes detention ponds near Judice, recording one of his signature selfie-style videos.
The subject of his ire that day? The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “The Corps of Engineers no longer serves our republic,” Higgins tells his followers, before launching a fusillade of criticism at the Corps’ work over the past two decades.
Higgins has reason to be mad. Four years ago, in 2021, he secured a major win for those who see dredging the Vermilion River as the answer to Lafayette’s flooding woes. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had $50 million in its work plan to dredge the river. To date, Higgins laments, none of that money has been spent on dredging.
Dredging the Vermilion has been a focus of some Lafayette residents when it comes to flood prevention over the past decade. And to date, the cause hasn’t led to much action, apart from some river cleanup and maintenance by LCG during the Guillory era.
Residents like Dave Dixon, a retired engineer who co-founded and now serves as president of the board of Dredge the Vermilion, a nonprofit founded in response to the 2016 floods that saw the river breach its banks and flood adjacent homes. Some 5,000 total homes were flooded during the historic event.
The flooding, Dixon and others say, can in part be attributed to a lack of river maintenance since the 1950s, pointing to limited flooding in the latter half of the past century that has worsened over time. The Corps has not dredged the Vermilion River in 20 years, with sections in the city averaging three to four feet in depth.
“The river can’t handle the volume of water we’re trying to send to the river right now,” Dixon told the Lafayette City Council in July, part of a refrain he has been echoing in meetings across the state. He often likens the river to a “heart patient” with clogged arteries.
But scientists and the Corps have questioned whether dredging the river would make a significant impact on flood risk across the city and parish.
“A watershed-centered approach, instead of a riverine-centered approach, is needed for flood management,” concluded a 2021 study of river dredging co-authored by UL professor Emad Habib, and based on models of the river and watershed, which would encompass all areas from and in which water collects during storm events.
The Corps itself determined a full-scale dredging of the river from Vermilion Bay would be too costly and do too little justify, an analysis that at one time spurred Higgins to determine dredging was not “the silver bullet that we thought it would be.”
The studies align much more with what Lafayette flood maps tell the naked eye.
The maps show that the high-risk areas around the river are very narrow, while vast flood zones in the city and parish have little direct relationship to the river.
In Lafayette’s Downtown, several businesses have flooded four times since 2019 alone; the flooding is often already in storefronts before the river’s flood stage rises. The city is pitching a plan to divert floodwater from where it overflows on Lee Avenue to under Johnston Street, but that project is not slated to start until late 2026.
Development throughout Lafayette Parish has also contributed to the increased runoff threatening to overwhelm even a deeper Vermilion, Habib’s study points out. Between 2001 and 2021, in Lafayette Parish, nearly 50% of housing development occurred in areas within the 500-year floodplain.
While the river does influence flood risk in the watershed, it’s not the primary cause of flooding in Lafayette Parish. But many of the city’s most valuable private properties are located along the river, contributing heavily towards the $200 million in flood insurance claims across the parish from the 2016 floods.
Even some river residents and dredging advocates have come to the conclusion that dredging alone won’t be the answer to Lafayette’s flooding problems.
“The name of the organization is Dredge the Vermilion, and that is a very small part of the solution,” says Jeremiah Supple, a river resident and member of the advocacy group.
Instead, Supple points out, collective decision-making and improved communication among municipalities would likely provide for more effective flood mitigation. The group even went as far as to draw up a plan for the entire watershed.
“What I found interesting is all the parishes that are involved in the watershed all impact each other, and everything one parish does impacts the other, even though they all act independently of one another,” Supple says.
The conclusion that dredging the Vermilion will only be a small part of the solution raises questions about whether spending $50 million in federal dollars on it is worth pursuing, given the scope of the problem across the parish.
Higgins seems to think so. In social media and Congress, the representative has derided the Corps for its inaction and even called for it to be dissolved in response, calling out its “thick bureaucracy” as standing in the way of “protecting lives and property.”
The Corps told The Current its availability to engage with media was limited due to the federal government’s shutdown, but said it was currently working with nonfederal partners to identify and acquire dredge material disposal sites, an effort that includes obtaining environmental clearances.
“Our current target to advance dredging operations is the 2026 fiscal year,” a spokesperson for the Corps told The Current in an email. The project, the spokesperson noted, is authorized for both navigation and flood risk management purposes.
Meanwhile, Higgins has called for the agency’s dissolution on both social media and the U.S. House of Representatives floor. He’s made a broader case for shuttering federal agencies, and transferring their authorities and obligations over functions like emergency response and water management to state governments.
“These projects should be 100% turned over to the sovereign States and local government partners,” he wrote on X earlier this month. “I intend to force this debate into the House of We the People, and to the attention of our President.”
