Look back at events that made news in 2023

What can we say about 2023?
Instead of sheltering, we were sweltering.
Once more, we detoured our way around extensive work on a bridge crossing Berwick Bay.
One St. Mary hospital unveiled a $22 million investment in the parish’s health. Another local hospital came in for criticism for a reduction in the services it offers.
2023 was a year of change in state and local government. St. Mary got its biggest economic development victory in decades.
Speaking of victory, a group of Berwick High young men, who lost a state baseball title by a run in 2022, came back to win the crown in even more dramatic fashion.
Here are some of the top stories we followed in 2023:
Weather or not
The year taught us that weather can make news even without a major hurricane.
For the second straight year, the June 1-Nov. 30 hurricane season passed without so much as a close call for south Louisiana. The break was welcome after the record-breaking 2020 season and the near miss from Hurricane Ida in 2021.
The lull continued even though we saw a return to the hurricane-favoring El Niño weather pattern.
The Colorado State and National Hurricane Center predictions were for a more active than average tropical weather season. Those predictions came true with 20 named storms in 2023. They just didn’t threaten south Louisiana.
But we didn’t escape a prolonged drought from early summer into November, accompanied by heat that was oppressive even by Gulf Coast standards.
The drought contributed to a series of wildfires in the state. Officials estimate that more than 400 fires damaged 60,000 acres, forcing evacuations in the west Louisiana towns of Merryville and Singer and straining state and local firefighting resources to the limit.
The Tiger Island fire alone covered more than 33,000 acres. At least one death, an elderly woman who died after being rescued from a St Tammany Parish fire, was attributed to the blazes.
The LSU AgCenter estimated damage to Louisiana crops at nearly $1.7 billion.
Louisiana was under a statewide burn ban for much of the summer and fall. The ban forced cancellation of the Louisiana Shrimp & Petroleum Festival fireworks display.
The dry weather caused a new kind of problem: saltwater intrusion into municipal water systems linked to low water levels in the Mississippi River. The biggest threat was to the New Orleans area, but water advisories were also posted in Baldwin.
Not open
for deliveries
The relationship between Ochsner Health, widely credited with saving Morgan City’s hospital from closure in 2019, and St. Mary residents underwent some pains in 2023.
Ochsner announced in March that it would end labor and delivery services at Ochsner St. Mary as of April 1.
Ochsner cited demographic trends toward an older population and what it characterized as a relatively low number of births. The numbers didn’t justify a large enough obstetrics staff to ensure patient safety.
Ochsner announced that it was consolidating Bayou Region labor and delivery services at Ochsner St. Anne in Raceland.
But the community had questions, raised at public meetings of Hospital Service District No. 2, which owns the hospital operated under lease with Ochsner.
The nearest hospitals are 20 to 52 minutes away from Morgan City, they said. What happens when babies come early? What about emergency deliveries in which the lives of mother and child are at risk? What about women who lack transportation for normal prenatal care available only at a distance?
The hospital district board pledged to work with Ochsner to keep obstetrical care at Ochsner St. Mary, and Ochsner agreed to listen. The board also made plans for a ballot proposition resurrecting a property tax and rededicating funds from a defunct tax for, among other things, attracting labor and delivery physicians.
But when a summer deadline passed without an agreement, the board canceled plans to put those propositions on the Oct. 14 ballot.
The year ended with board member Angelena Brocato making the rounds at local council meetings to seek support for bringing obstetrical care back to Ochsner St. Mary.
A $22M ounce
of prevention
Franklin Foundation Hospital became Bayou Bend Health Care System, and the name was more than just a cosmetic change.
In July, local officials and Gov. John Bel Edwards cut the ribbon to open the hospital’s new Wellness Center, which had been under construction for more than two years in the Northwest Boulevard area in Franklin, an area targeted for future growth.
The 60,000-square-foot facility has all the features of a modern health club: a massive room full of weights, treadmills and other exercise equipment; a pool; a snack bar; and rooms for classes.
But the facility was constructed with more in mind than just sweatin’ to the oldies. It’s an attempt to focus more health care resources, including state-federal Medicaid resources, into cost-effective prevention.
“My challenge to you,” Edwards said at the center’s ribbon-cutting in July, “is to make sure we produce better health outcomes because of this facility. If we do that, the quality of life is going to go up, health care costs are going to go down and then we all will see the wisdom of replicating this facility all over the state.”
“The whole idea,” said state Sen. Bret Allain before the ribbon-cutting, “is to turn a health care system into a wellness system.”
Where the rubber
meets the road
The year opened with a major economic development win for St. Mary Parish.
St. Mary and Franklin officials and the Melis Group in January announced plans by Korean tire manufacturer Kumho to build a tire distribution center in Franklin.
The proposed center is billed as a 350,000-square-foot facility that will employ 100 people to start when it’s completed in two years.
Franklin Mayor Eugene Foulcard explained the deal this way:
“We have three major carbon black plants — Columbian, Cabot and Degussa — which played a huge part in that decision to come into this area, and the Port of New Orleans. It’s about a hundred mile truck run from New Orleans to Franklin, and that was a win-win to get the tires offloaded at the Port of New Orleans and shipped to this logistics and distribution center.
“When they bring the tires in, from my understanding, they’re also going to pick up carbon black, take it back to the Port of New Orleans, and eventually they’ll be shipping that back to Korea to make the tires.”
Even apart from the boost in construction spending and employment resulting from the center, local officials have hopes for more. The idea is that those area plants for manufacturing carbon black, used as a pigment in products including tires, would make St. Mary attractive as the site for a tire factory.
Bridge closed:
detour to 2025
No sooner had the four-lane U.S. 90 bridge over Berwick Bay fully reopened in fall 2022 than plans were announced for a major rehabilitation of the older Long-Allen Bridge that carries La. 182 bridge traffic over the bay.
The Long-Allen bridge, which opened in 1933, was closed in February 2023 so Southern Road and Bridge of Tarpon Springs, Florida, could perform the $26 million rehab project. The project includes cleaning and painting the bridge and making any needed repairs on the bridge deck and surface and on the superstructure above the deck.
Officials said the bridge is too narrow to accommodate safe passage while the work is going on, so it will remain closed for the duration of the project, expected to take at least 2-1/2 years.
Newly painted portions of the bridge peep from beneath the protective shrouds over the La. 182 bridge’s superstructure, and they show the same silver-gray color in which the new bridge was painted. Will the old bridge be recognizable without the familiar rust-colored reddish brown?
The newer bridge had reopened after a long-delayed rehab project that restricted traffic to one lane in either direction beginning in September 2019. The project, expected to require to last a year or so stretched into more than three years because of hurricanes, COVID and the resulting material shortages.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Morgan City, social media posts expressed frustration with delays in repairing damage to the La. 182 bridge over Bayou Ramos. The bridge was damage by a barge strike in December 2021, leading to one-lane restrictions in either direction.
The Department of Transportation and Development announced that it was advertising for bids on repair project. That announcement came in July 2023.
Fatal crash
St. Mary residents were saddened to learn that Patterson businessman Dean Lee Felterman, 69, and pilot Mufid Jabour, 48, of Denham Springs were killed when their twin-engine Cessna crashed Oct. 12 from Harry P. Williams Memorial Airport near Patterson.
The National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report quoted family members as saying Jabour was to have used the plane he owned to fly Felterman to Houston for a medical appointment. Jabour flew from Denham Springs to Patterson to pick up Felterman at Harry P. Williams.
There, just after takeoff, the plane crashed into a cane field just off the end of the runway. Both men were pronounced dead at the scene.
The NTSB found a record of an instrumentation problem with the plane’s right engine with no sign that it had been repaired. Examination of the debris found damaged valve springs, also in the right engine. But the official determination of the crash’s cause could take a year or more, the NTSB said.
New faces among
St. Mary’s leaders
The 2023 elections, in which Gov.-elect Jeff Landry’s victory led a Republican sweep of statewide offices, represented a changing of the guard for leaders representing St. Mary Parish.
Among legislative races, businessman Robert Allain of Franklin won a runoff against longtime parish Chief Administrative Officer Henry “Bo” LaGrange of Patterson in the state Senate District 21 race. Both men are Republicans.
Allain will succeed his father, Bret Allain, who is term-limited after reaching the chairmanship of the Senate Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Committee.
On the House side, both St. Mary representatives were easily returned for new terms. Vincent St. Blanc III of Franklin, whose District 50 covers most of St. Mary, won his first try at re-election. State Rep. Beryl Amedee of Gray, whose District 51 extends into east St. Mary, qualified without opposition.
Again, both are Republicans, and they helped strengthen the GOP’s hold on executive branch and legislative offices.
Changes are coming in St. Mary Parish government, too.
Chief Deputy Gary Driskell was the outright winner from a four-candidate field in the Oct. 14 primary race for sheriff. He’ll succeed Sheriff Blaise Smith, who is stepping down at the end of the year.
Driskell will take office with hopes of strengthening times between deputies and the community.
Former District Judge Greg Aucoin will be the new clerk of court after qualifying without opposition to succeed the retiring Cliff Dressel.
Sam Jones can’t be called a new face after serving as Franklin mayor, state representative, and member of the Kathleen Blanco and John Bel Edwards administrations. So he had name recognition going into the race to succeed term-limited Parish President David Hanagriff, and he won election of the post.
Jones has said that, because he is retired from other employment, he’ll be a full-time parish president who serves a single term. He wants his successors to be full-time parish presidents, too, and he said in December that he hopes to bring about a charter amendment to that end.
He’ll have some convincing to do, based on the results of a March 2023 charter amendment proposal. The amendment, proposed as a step toward a full-time presidency, would have raised the parish president’s salary from the current $1,000 per month to the average of the salaries of the parish’s five mayors, currently around $50,000 a year.
The 11-member Parish Council will have two new members after the fall elections: David Hill of Bayou Vista, who won election to the District 4 seat being vacated by incumbent Scott Ramsey, and James “Jimmy” Davis of Morgan City, who defeated incumbent Councilman James Bennett.
The St. Mary Parish School Board will also begin the new year with a new member under sad circumstances. In its last meeting of 2023, the board appointed retired St. Mary Schools administrator Guienzy Brent to the seat left vacant by the Dec. 9 death of Joseph Foulcard.
Foulcard, of Franklin, had served on the board for 28 years.
Brent’s appointment continues a time of transition for the School Board, which until last year had been largely filled by members with decades of service.
In 2022, five new board members were elected for the 2023-27 term. Another, current board President Alaina Black of Morgan City, is in the first year of her second term. Two more, Debra Jones of Franklin and current Vice President Tammie Moore of Four Corners, were elected to short terms after being appointed to fill vacancies, then re-elected in 2022.
In all, nine of the 11 board members will have served five years or less. Only Ginger Griffin and Marilyn LaSalle, both of Patterson, were in office before the 2018 elections.
After taking office, the new board made a couple of changes to make School Board actions more readily available. The starting time for the board’s regular second-Thursday meetings in Centerville was pushed back from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., then to 5:30 p.m. as a compromise, to accommodate working people. Regular board meetings are now livestreamed.
But the biggest task faced by the new board was the election of a new superintendent to succeed Dr. Teresa Bagwell. They chose Dr. Buffy Fegenbush, a former Berwick High principal who had spent the previous few years as a central office administrator in Lafayette Parish.
More green
for the blue
When Morgan City Police Chief James F. Blair announced his retirement in April 2022, he also gave the City Council a warning: Turnover in the department was “unsustainable,” Blair said.
More than 40 department employees had left the department in the previous three years, he said.
Some of the turnover resulted from retirements, Blair said. But he blamed the bulk of the turnover on an average pay that was $4 an hour less than the pay in surrounding police departments.
In the Morgan City Fire Department, Fire Chief Alvin Cockerham reported, the pay differential was just as bad, if not worse.
The City Council came up with a $1-an-hour pay rise for new Police Department hires and pledged to look for more. And members did, working with Cockerham and newly appointed Police Chief Chad Adams.
Their proposal was a half-cent sales tax to raise $1.3 million for a $3-an-hour across the board raise and to fund police and firefighter training.
The tax proposal followed a controversial School Board sales tax for teacher pay, and Morgan City has a conservative electorate. But officials made their case to the public, which responded by approving the tax hike April 29 by an 87%-13% margin.
Championship
caliber
In 2022, Berwick High came within a run of winning the Class 3A state baseball championship, stranding a runner on third in a 5-4 title game loss to Lutcher. So, with a solid nucleus of returning players, the Panthers were preseason favorites to win it all in 2023.
Then came injury after injury, and by playoff time, Berwick was seeded fifth in Non-Select Division III.
The Panthers put it together and swept series with Port Barre and Sterlington, then knocked off Kinder 4-1 in the semifinals. For the title, Doyle took Berwick into eight innings before Panther Jayden Milton cracked a home run to give BHS the championship.
“It was a truly special season,” coach Seth Henry said at last week’s championship ring ceremony, “with a special group of guys.”
In boys basketball, Patterson made a deep run into the playoffs. After being seeded fourth, the Lumberjacks beat Caldwell Parish and Rayville to reach the Non-Select Division III semifinals. There, they saw a late lead disappear against eventual champions Port Allen and lost 77-75 in three overtimes.
Central Catholic’s volleyball team also came within a match of a chance at a state title. Seeded fourth in Division V, the Eagles swept Slaughter Community Charter and Southern Lab, then won a 3-1 decision over Louise McGehee to earn a place in the state semifinals.
There, Central Catholic ran into a powerhouse in eventual champion Metairie Country Day, which eliminated the Eagles in straight games.
Finally, Morgan City High grad Vernon Norwood finished fourth in the World Track and Field Championships men’s 400 meters in Budapest.
Norwood’s time was 0.13 off his personal best of 44.26, set in the semifinal heat at Budapest.
Norwood had brought home two medals from the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, including a gold, for his contribution to two relay teams.
Deep in
their hearts
A years-long effort paid off in April with the unveiling of the Oilfield Divers Monument near Morgan City Municipal Auditorium. The public got a look at the life-size statue of an oilfield diver and celebrated the work of men who helped make Morgan City Morgan City.
The unveiling ceremony April 29, and a reception the night before, brought many of those men back to relive the early days of offshore oil production and the sometimes dangerous underwater work it required. Hundreds turned out for the ceremony.
Eric Hofsommer, who made his way from the Missouri Ozarks to the Gulf Coast to become a diver in the 1960s, remembered that he once spent a week in a decompression chamber after a 501-foot dive.
“No matter what you do,” Hofsommer said, “you can’t eliminate all the risk. That’s what it makes it fun.”
The team that developed the monument included Rusty Wright, Bryce Merrill, Jack Vilas III, Virgil Allen and Micah Allen.