Good news abounds for port, housing authority

The Morgan City Council received a couple of positive reports at its regular meeting Tuesday. One indicates that public housing here is approaching full capacity, and the other was about a clear shipping channel all the way to the Gulf.
Executive directors Clarence Robinson of the Morgan City Housing Authority and Raymond “Mac” Wade of the Port of Morgan City made those reports at Tuesday’s regular City Council meeting.
Robinson’s report was accompanied by a $58,000 check, the authority’s payment in lieu of 2023 taxes that the city would get if the authority’s homes were privately owned.
The yearly payment for 2021 was about $42,000 and $45,000 for 2022.
The homes overseen by the authority are 96% occupied and heading toward 98% soon, Robinson told the council.
“That tells you that in our community, there’s a need for housing,” Robinson said.
Last year, the authority completed hurricane-related roof replacements at Jacquet, Joe Ruffin and Shannon Homes at a cost of $536,000.
Roofing work will begin in March at Brownell Homes. Hebert’s Construction has the $473,960 contract for that work.
The authority has also gone paperless in some transactions, allowing Section 8 landlords to view tenant documents and print tax documents and tenants to pay rent online.
Wade didn’t bring a check, but recent work at the Port of Morgan City is nevertheless providing economic benefits.
At the port, where a series of floods beginning in 2016 kept the channel at less than its authorized depth and width into 2022, the situation has taken a dramatic turn for the better, according to information provided by Wade.
“We’ve got the best river we’ve ever had,” Wade told the council. “We had it last year, and we’ve got it this year.”
After Hurricane Ida damaged port facilities to the east in 2021, previously hard-to-come-by dredging funds have poured in from the federal government by way of the Army Corps of Engineers. That dredge funding amounted to $50 million last year, and funding has been secured for more dredging this year, Wade said before the meeting.
As many as six dredges at a time have been at work on the channel between Morgan City and the Gulf. Four are currently at work, Wade said.
They include the Brice Civil Constructors dredge Arulaq, which started as an experiment in removing soft silt and clay, known as fluff, from the channel using an agitation process that returns material to the water to be carried out to sea.
The Arulaq has so far removed 300 million cubic yards of fluff from the lower end of the channel, and its contract has been renewed for four years.
The port itself has invested $6.5 million — including $5 million from the Department of Transportation and Development and $1.5 million from the port — in an east dock expansion.
A planned west dock expansion, for which Wade hopes work will begin this spring, will cost $30 million from the port, the state capital outlay budget, the DOTD and the federal Maritime Administration.
The hard-to-obtain $10 million grant from the agency known as MARAD came from a pool of $23 million and was the only grant awarded in Louisiana.
So far, the open channel hasn’t lured back the larger import-export vessels that were beginning to appear here by 2015. But Wade said the open waterway is a boon for the region’s ship- and barge-building industries.