From the Editor: We may get trillions, but what we need is a plan

The biggest argument over infrastructure is over what infrastructure is.
President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion, eight-year plan, which relies mainly on increases in corporate taxes, pushes the boundaries to include job training, high-tech and medical manufacturing, care for the disabled and elderly, and the pipes that carry water into your home.
Republicans hope to fight off the tax hikes and limit spending to a more traditional definition that includes highways, bridges, ports and airports.
If we look with the narrower view, one thing is clear: Tens of millions of dollars have been pouring into St. Mary Parish for infrastructure work. Equally clear is that tens of millions of work remain to be funded and carried out.
Start with one aspect of infrastructure that attracts more attention here than elsewhere in the country: drainage and flood control.
On one end of St. Mary, construction continues on the Bayou Chene Flood Control Structure. The $80 million project, funded through the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, will allow a barge to be moved into place to block back-flooding when the Atchafalaya River runs high, offering protection to people in six parishes.
There was talk at the April 12 Port of Morgan City board meeting that the Bayou Chene work may create the largest such structure in the world.
In western St. Mary, the Bayou Teche Flood Control Structure is all but finished. That $11 million project, funded by the Department of Transportation and Development and the St. Mary Levee District, will protect the area near Franklin, Garden City and Centerville from storm surge running up the Charenton Canal.
In Morgan City, the pre-consolidation Gravity Drainage District No. 2 did millions of dollars in work to improve the levees that ring the city.
The Levee District made successful improvements in the North Bend area and is working on more in the Yokely Bayou area, the last piece of levee that will enclose the area east of the Charenton Canal.
Smaller projects are coming online, too. The Berwick Town Council was pleased April 13 to hear that the 10-inch, one-day rainfall last month didn’t cause home flooding in Country Club Estates. Thirty-nine homes in the subdivision took on water in a 2019 flash flood, prompting the town government to improve ditches.
The most expensive part of the improvements planned for that area involved subsurface work. And at the same meeting this month, the council heard that the town has been approved for a $1.6 million DOTD grant for those improvements.
But more needs to be done.
The Levee District has the responsibility for completing the levee improvements in the Lake End Park-Lakeside Subdivision-Siracusaville area. The district seems to have settled on a plan that involves a seawall rather than simply walling off the subdivision from Lake Palourde.
But that plan could cost $30 million, and no funding sources has been announced.
In Patterson, Mayor Rodney Grogan recently announced that the city government will receive $2.1 million from the president’s American Rescue Plan. But he also noted that just one flood-control project, designed to protect homes south of the railroad tracks, will cost $2.6 million.
Drivers in east St. Mary get a daily reminder of the need for infrastructure improvements. Traffic on the U.S. 90 bridge has been limited to one lane in either direction for more than a year as crews work on repairs and rehab.
The fondest hope of the Port of Morgan City board is to open local waterways to larger vessels, allowing the port to be used as a transshipment point for products such as Louisiana rice. Each time a ship docks here to load or unload, money would flow into the local economy.
Tens of millions have been spent on keeping channels open. The Brice Civil Constructors dredge, designed to remove sticky “fluff” mud from the channel, is at work from Eugene Island to the Gulf. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which funded the Brice work to the tune of $14 million so far, has more projects planned for Crewboat Cut to Eugene Island and for the Stouts Pass area, where vessels have been grounding themselves with uncomfortable frequency.
This is one of the happy times for the port.
But much of the work could be undone by a single flood that brings sediment down the Mississippi and through the Atchafalaya. And it’s nothing for those Corps dredging projects to run up a $10 million-$20 million bill.
For most of us, our daily contact with infrastructure is with streets and highways. There has been progress here, too.
A parish government bond issue and a revenue sharing arrangement has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to local governments, mostly for street overlays but also for some major reconstruction.
But the needs in this area are great, too.
The big enchilada is I-49 South. The idea is to upgrade U.S. 90 to interstate standards from Lafayette, where I-49 currently ends at I-10, all the way to New Orleans.
In our area, that means eliminating crossover intersections between the Calumet Cut and Berwick.
In a 2013 meeting of state and local officials, transportation experts said that work was to cost an estimated $435 million. But, because the state couldn’t find a funding source, engineers came up with a slimmed down $238 million plan.
It’s eight years later, and no funding sources has been announced for the $238 million project, either.
It’s great to get grants and the one-off multimillion projects. But the United States, a nation with greater material prosperity than this world has ever known, has allowed its most important assets to fall into disrepair.
We haven’t been keeping the place up.
That $2 trillion boost would be nice. But what we really need is a plan to keep from getting into this shape again.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.