From the Editor: Fighting that other bug

FRANKLIN — While public attention has been focused on the new threat from COVID-19, a new St. Mary Parish department has been at work protecting against a health hazard Louisiana people know too well.
This week is National Mosquito Control Awareness Week. And parish Public Works Director Jean Paul Bourg is looking back on an experiment that he believes is working well.
About the time Bourg became public works director 2-1/2 years ago, he attended a Louisiana Mosquito Control Association conference. There he learned that federal funding administered at the state level was available for an in-house program.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is especially interested in mosquito control as a way to fight West Nile virus, encephalitis, Zika and other diseases.
Most of the mosquito control was provided under contract. The big name among contractors in this region is Cajun Mosquito Control of New Iberia, operated by Jesse Boudreaux. The company provides mosquito control for local governments and has become a go-to source for reporters when mosquito-borne diseases appear in trapped mosquitoes.
When the parish government hired a control contractor for unincorporated areas, the spending sometimes exceeded the $180,000 a year raised by the $2 per month residents pay on their water bills for mosquito control, Bourg said.
Complaints or requests for spraying came in to the Parish Courthouse and went directly to the contractor. And if additional spraying was needed, the parish paid additional costs with no direct control over the spending.
The parish government decided to switch to an in-house program and obtained a $250,000 grant.
Secily Firmin, who had worked for Cajun Mosquito Control, was hired as the mosquito control supervisor. She’s the only full-time employee in the parish program.
“A lot of people misunderstood that we were going to use [the grant] to pay employees,” Bourg said. But the grant was used largely for equipment.
The program has four pick-up trucks and sprayers, two ATVs for jobs like spraying along golf course cart paths, a microscope and other tools to send samples to the LSU Veterinary School for testing, mosquito traps, a backpack sprayer and other items.
Parish employees drive the spraying trucks part-time.
The program has three major components:
—Spraying. The unincorporated areas — excluding Cypremort Point, which has its own property tax for mosquito control — are divided into 10 zones. Spraying is conducted in each zone once a week, and will be increased to twice a week later in the year.
Another acquisition with the grant money is GeoTracker software. It tracks the spaying trucks and records the time any location was sprayed, how fast the truck was going and the rate at which the chemical was sprayed.
—Larvicide. The program treats areas of standing water where mosquitoes might breed.
—Surveillance. Mosquito traps are placed at 15 points around the parish. The traps are checked twice a week to see if disease is present. The only case so far, Bourg said, is an instance of St. Louis encephalitis in 2018.
At the end of the program’s first full year, it had operated with less than the $180,000 in mosquito control revenue.
“That’s not what we expect every year, but it was within the budget,” Bourg said. “We saved money for the parish and provided better service.”
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.