Louisiana cancels $3B repair coastal restoration funded by Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana officially canceled a $3 billion coastal restoration funded by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement money, state and federal agencies confirmed Thursday.

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project had been intended to rebuild upward of 20 square miles (32 kilometers) of land in southeast Louisiana to combat sea level rise and erosion on the Gulf Coast. The money must be used on coastal restoration and it was not immediately clear if the $618 million the state has already spent will have to be returned, as federal trustees warned last year.

Conservation groups and other supporters of the project stressed it was an ambitious, science-based approach to mitigating the worst effects of a vanishing coastline in a state where a football field of land is lost every 100 minutes. The project would have diverted sediment-laden water from the Mississippi River to restore wetlands disappearing due to a range of factors including climate-change induced sea level rise and a vast river levee system that choked off natural land regeneration.

“The science has not changed, nor has the need for urgent action,” said Kim Reyher, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. “What has changed is the political landscape.”

While the project had largely received bipartisan support and was championed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry became a vocal opponent after taking office last year. He recoiled at the price and amplified concerns that the massive influx of freshwater would destroy fisheries that local communities rely on for their livelihoods.

Landry has said the project would “break” Louisiana’s culture of shrimp and oyster harvesting and compared it to government efforts a century ago to punish schoolchildren for speaking Cajun French.

“We fought this battle a long time, but Gov. Landry is the reason we won this battle,” said Mitch Jurisich, chair of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, who was suing the state over the project’s environmental impacts. “He really turned the tide.”

The Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group, a coalition of federal agencies overseeing settlement funds from the 2010 Gulf oil spill, said in a Thursday statement that the Mid-Barataria project is “no longer viable” for a range of reasons including litigation and the suspension of a federal permit after the state issued a stop-work order on the project.

A spokesperson for Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority confirmed to The Associated Press that the state is canceling the project.