Looking into the future the Pelican feeding its young from a self-induced wound in its own breast (as depicted, mysteriously, on the state flag of Louisiana) is accepted as an appropriate symbol of both self-sacrifice and rebirth. Through his selfless efforts, man is raised from the slavery of ignorance to the condition of freedom conferred by wisdom. Given the current state of affairs in Louisiana, one hopes that the understanding of the Pelican as a symbol shall point the way towards a new consciousness of ourselves as a whole, and lead us to face our futures with strength, grace, wisdom and faith, to learn from our mistakes and carry our successes and zest for living to future generations.

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Comments on Preliminary Draft of the Comprehensive Coastal Protection Master Plan for Louisiana, submitted by Oliver A Houck, Professor of Law, Tulane University

December 17, 2006

Sidney Coffee
Chair, Governor’s Office of Coastal Activities
Office of the Governor,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Randy Hanchy
Deputy Secretary
Department of Natural Resources
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Dear Sidney and Randy,

Please accept these comments on the above Draft Plan. By way of background, I have researched, taught, published on and participated in litigation and the development of legislation and regulations for Louisiana coastal zone issues since l971. Two articles among others that bookend this experience, are Land Loss in Coastal Louisiana: Causes, Consequences and Remedies, Tulane Law Review (1983) and Can We Save New Orleans?, Tulane Environmental Law Journal (2006). These comments are based on this experience and on conversations with members of the Louisiana coastal scientific and engineering community, whose experience in some cases pre-dates my own.

Overall, the Draft Plan is an advance over previous planning efforts towards an integration of coastal protection and restoration. Looking backwards, that is the good news. Looking forward, as we must, the Plan falls short. It’s primary difficulties are in its assumptions, its science, and its failure to provide for the management of the landscape as a whole. In more particular:

A. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS:

1. Objectives. The Plan identifies several objectives. It provides great detail on the first of them, hurricane protection, less detail on the second, restoration, and no detail on the planning that will be required to maintain the sustainability of the coastal zone. It thus repeats the familiar levees - first scenario for water resources development in Louisiana. Unless planning and restoration are made first priorities, the rest, over time, will not matter.

2. Alternatives. The Plan is presented as that, a plan. Elements of the plan, particularly the levee elements, are presented in considerable detail. There is no presentation of alternatives from which a decision-maker (and the public) can choose. This approach violates the essence of a planning process, which is to fully and publicly consider the options. No amount of declarations about keeping an open mind erase the fact that only one option is being advanced.

3. Foreclosure. Some elements of the Plan are new and will be subject to detailed further study. Other elements, and particularly the Morganza to the Gulf Project, are accepted without question, although it is based on outdated assumptions of project storm and project costs and although the environment it affects has been dramatically changed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Accepting the project and its alignment as given compromises any effort to explore less damaging and less costly alternatives. A serious planning effort has to put its major elements on the table.

4. Severability. The Plan is presented, in overview, as a joint venture between opening up northern portions of the coastal zone to restore river inputs and cordoning off the zone at the bottom with “leaky levees”. These two elements are by no means interdependent. A wide consensus in the scientific community supports restoring natural hydrology into and through the coastal zone. Such projects, however, can be done without reference to levees along the coast. The most glaring omission in the entire Plan is an alternative that would make major structural improvements to inflow and through-flow from the north without leveeing off the zone below. From a coastal restoration point of view, this is without doubt Option A.

5. Levees. Levees are the enemy of viable coastal systems; the larger and more extensive they are, the worse they are. The literature on their adverse impacts is overwhelming. The Plan seems to respond to this phenomenon by proposing even greater levees, on the theory that these new levees will be more environmentally friendly. Again, the obvious option is missing. If the current hydrology of the coastal zone is damaged by existing road bed, marsh management and other structures, it will be more easily and surely remedied by eliminating or modifying these obstacles than by building large new levees. Option B, however, is also not on the table.

6. The Precautionary Principle. An emerging principle of science and policy is the need to approach activities that have great potential impact with great caution. The greater the impact, the heavier the burden shifts on proponents to show no adverse long term effects. This Plan will determine the fate of the most productive coastal zone in North America for all time, for good or ill. The unknowns in this Plan are large. The burden is on its proponents to satisfy the many science, engineering and social questions it raises.

7. Implementation. The Plan is completely silent on how any of its ambitions are to be executed, by what body, and with what degree of expert and public participation. There is no framework for the long term, and this is a very long term project. Option C is the proposal of a planning and management entity capable of handling the engineering, scientific and land use planning elements inherent in the Plan. Handing these elements off laterally to existing institutions is an invitation to Babel. We not only need a new Plan; we need a new institution.
   RECOMMENDATIONS: The next Draft Plan should be presented as a comparison of several structural and non-structural options for expert and public comment. It, further, should place all of its major components before the public; post-Katrina, everything about Louisiana coastal planning has changed, including the necessary priority of restoring the coastal zone. The Plan should, further, present the major scientific unknowns and its own responses to them. Lastly, it should propose a viable institutional framework for implementing the Plan over what will be a very long time.
   SPECIFIC COMMENTS

8. Levee Alignments. To the naked eye, and the science eye, the most aggressive features of the Plan are two large levee loops running from the Mississippi River south and west, nearly touching the Gulf of Mexico. The second of these, Morganza to the Gulf, is mentioned above. The first, the Barataria Basin unit, is even more breathtaking in its inclusion of undeveloped wetland areas. To say the least, alternative, more northern alignments of each proposal deserve serious consideration and exposition to the public. Consider them Options D and E: alternative alignments along existing route 190.

9. “Leaky” Levees. The Plan seems to assume that providing gaps in these levees will offset their adverse environmental consequences. No assumption in the document is less proven. Indeed, no assumption is more disproven by previous experience in Louisiana. We have already tried these measures by cutting gaps in the spoilbanks along oil and gas canals, with meager results; the backwater areas ponded, or starved, and died out. We tried again with canal plugs, that washed out. We tried with larger marsh management projects, hailed as the savior of the coast; they too ponded and turned largely to open water. The Plan’s levees are in effect huge marsh management projects. All evidence is that they will harm wetlands.

10. Unknowns. At the very least, the concept of “leaky” levees present several serious unknowns. It would be the antithesis of caution to bet the farm so completely while these unknowns are pending. They include:
    1. The effects on surface water hydrology of the marsh;
    2. Differences in impacts between open water and marsh;
    3. Impacts of levees of this weight and footprint on subsurface hydrology; and
    4. Impacts on storm drive transport of sediments north, into the coastal zone from the Gulf.
    The urgency of all of these questions would be blunted by aligning the levee systems themselves along route 190 or another, non wetland corridor. As they now stand, leaky levees present more of an opportunity to develop coastal wetlands than a remedy to restore them.

11. Development Impacts. The history of Louisiana unfolds in one of two ways; wetland development and a cry for levees, or a cry for levees in order then to develop the wetlands. Mega-levees of the kind proposed in the Plan invite both scenarios. The Plan is untenably vague in its response to this phenomenon. Unconsidered Option F is the acquisition and public ownership and management of all enclosed wetlands, to reduce development pressures.

12. Regulatory Programs. Ostensibly, Louisiana’s coastal wetlands are protected under both federal and state permit programs. The practice is otherwise. The Plan makes no mention of continued permitting behind and ahead of whatever levee alignments are ultimately chosen. Assurances that these programs will control wetland development are naive or disingenuous. Current permits are based on mitigation projects that underperform badly, where they perform at all. Concomitant with the expenditure of coastal protection and restoration monies, the State needs to articulate a new policy and program for wetland permitting based on no new loss, not mitigated loss. Option G.

13. Spoilbanks. Nor is mention made of the restoration of thousands of miles of canals, now dredged and lined with spoil banks that have done enormous damage to the wetlands are continuing to erode. The spoilbanks alone represent a resource available for backfilling and other uses. Option H: tear down these walls, and assess those responsible for them their fair share of the costs.

14. Armoring. The Plan seems to rely at many locations on armoring the coast with rocks and other bulwarks against the Gulf. We have done this, too, many times before, and the rocks and jetties tend to end up in open water, after the erosion has cut in behind them. Critical inquiry should be made into the expectations of these projects, and alternatives to them.

15. Quantification. No mention is made of the most critical measuring stick for the state plan: How many acres of wetlands will be directly taken, indirectly affected, or open to development under the Plan, as opposed to how many acres are to be restored. And at what cost. One’s guess is that, measured by the costs of simply restoring the number of wetlands taken by the project alone, that the costs of the Plan will be significant, and should be a significant factor in the deciding among alternative approaches.

16. Alternative Costs. Ultimately, what is missing is a benefit/cost comparison among alternative plans (not of a single chosen plan), for expert review and comment. Only then can reasonable public responses and public choices be made.

17. Coastal Zoning. The plan seems to propose that Louisiana protect, behind levees, the maximum amount of land, and wetland, possible, because people want to live there. People should be able to live, on private lands, wherever they want, but expecting federal hurricane protection, infrastructure improvements and flood insurance is another thing. The long-term success of this Plan will depend on encouraging residential and commercial development to move out of vulnerable and environmentally sensitive areas. The Plan is stone silent on what these efforts can and should be, and what government inducements are possible. Those elements are yet another unconsidered option, Option I.

RECOMMENDATIONS: The Plan should address, again in option fashion, each of these concerns with enough specificity so that the public can comment on them, and have confidence that they will in fact be addressed.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The basic assumption of the Louisiana Plan is that the answer to a badly engineered coast is more engineering, witnessed in more controlled diversion structures, pumps and pipelines to transport sediments, gated weirs, pumps and pipelines. While these measures have their place, experience tells us that the more manipulation and human decision-making that is required, the more breakdown will occur. Recent history with the river diversions illustrate the point. And this is before one factors in perpetual maintenance requirements, subsiding soils and rising seas.

That system will work best that requires the least human intervention, and allows natural forces from the north and the south to work in their natural ways. A Plan that relies on the restoring the zone with a yet more complex system of engineering is doomed, over time, to fail. A Plan that maximizes removing the barriers to natural forces and getting out of their way will succeed.

Thank you for your consideration of these views.

Respectfully submitted,

Oliver A Houck
Professor of Law
Tulane University
New Orleans, Louisiana
Tel: 504 865 5946
Email: ohouck@tulane.edu