From the Editor: As St. Mary meets infrastructure needs, more emerge

St. Mary is in the middle of what may be an unprecedented number of capital improvement projects, directing tens of millions into the parish.
But, like a football team coming off a bad season, the parish is also in a rebuilding mode. And the more needs that get addressed, the more that seem to crop up.
The subject comes to mind as Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, slugs it out over President Joe Biden’s push for infrastructure funding.
The president has a $3.56 trillion, 10-year plan that includes not just money for bricks, asphalt and concrete, but also for nontraditional versions of what “infrastructure” means: free community college, child care, family leave and efforts to combat climate change among them.
The Senate approved a compromise version of the bill, calling for $1 trillion in spending on the more conventional view of infrastructure. It has money for an improved power grid; freight and passenger rail; ports; water safety and, in the West, water storage; highway safety projects; and more.
The Senate’s 69-30 vote in favor of the compromise included some Republican support largely because it included the traditional sort of infrastructure work and left out the expansion of social programs, which are to be taken up separately.
The leadership in the House, where Democrats have a larger but still thin majority, seems determined to go for the whole package.
From a conservative viewpoint, tacking the social program spending onto the traditional infrastructure work is a Trojan horse designed to enact a socialist agenda as the nation lays asphalt.
From a liberal point of view, it’s a simple matter of marginally expanding the definition of “infrastructure” to cover projects that help people go to work and open the door for commerce.
There’s no such debate over some big-ticket projects that have come St. Mary’s way recently.
When Hurricane Ida approached the coast last month, the St. Mary Parish Levee District was able to close a new flood gate on Bayou Teche near Baldwin. If Ida had made landfall closer to St. Mary, the gate would have blocked storm surge from coming up the Charenton Canal and flooding the area from Franklin to Centerville.
That project, completed last winter, cost $11 million, most of which came from the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.
And work continues on the Bayou Chene project, which will prevent back-flooding when the Atchafalaya River runs high. That work costs $80 million, funded through the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
More work is underway, including a levee project near the Yokely Canal and levee improvements in Morgan City. The big missing piece in the Morgan City work is the portion that runs from Siracusa to Lake End Park to offer protection from Lake Palourde flooding. That piece may end up costing $30 million, for which funding sources must be determined.
Even the $30 million looks small compared to some of our other infrastructure needs.
The Port of Morgan City is looking forward to having four dredges working on its channel simultaneously this fall. The goal is to have the port’s channel at its authorized depth all the way from the sea buoy to the port dock, opening the port to larger vessels. That would bring money into the local economy in this protracted time of post-fracking energy prices.
Just one of those dredges, Brice Civil Constructors’ Arulaq, was developed and operated under an Army Corps of Engineers contract with a cap of more than $20 million.
The port has been fighting to keep its channel open since 2016 during a series of floods and storms that have dumped sediment into local waterways. The question is whether the last five years were a meteorological fluke or the way things are now, requiring extensive and frequent dredging to maintain the channel.
It doesn’t take much of a dredging project to cost $10 million or more, and the availability of funding depends on the Corps’ priorities and its ability to wring money out of the convoluted federal budget process.
The grand-daddy of local infrastructure needs is probably I-49 South.
Federal and state authorities have a long-term goal of upgrading U.S. 90 to interstate standards from the current southern terminus of I-49 in Lafayette all the way to New Orleans.
Much of U.S. 90 is already at interstate standards with four lanes and controlled access. The most recent piece of that puzzle to be completed in St. Mary was the overpass at La. 318.
But more extensive work remains, including controlling the access on the portion between the Wax Lake Outlet and Berwick.
Being on an interstate, which theoretically will stretch from New Orleans to the Canadian border someday, has some obvious economic benefits. But it won’t be cheap.
At a 2013 meeting between state and local officials, the cost of the original plans for the Wax Lake to Berwick portion was expected to exceed $400 million. A slimmed-down version was still expected to come with a $200 million price tag.
In the meantime, the DOTD has installed J-turns along that stretch, helping to reduce the broadside “T-bone” crashes that can occur at points where local roads cross 55 mph four-lane.
It’s too soon to know if or how much St. Mary would benefit from the infrastructure work being debated in Congress.
But if Uncle Sam is looking for a place to spend some infrastructure billions, we’re in a position to help him out.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.