Read the full article at NOLA.com
Posted Jan 10, 2017
Plaquemines Parish President Amos Cormier III said Louisiana must follow the Netherlands’ lead in finding the will to save its coast, during a public hearing Monday night (Jan. 8) on Louisiana’s $562 million annual coastal restoration and protection plan.
Speaking to a sparse crowd at the Belle Chasse Auditorium — partly a result of bad weather and the national college football championship on TV — Cormier warned the state must guard against other parts of the nation not understanding the need to preserve as much of coastal Louisiana as possible.
His comments were in part a response to a Dec. 22 Bloomberg News Service article about LA SAFE, a program sponsored by the Louisiana Office of Community Development, in which the publication said the state was “finalizing a plan to move thousands of people from areas threatened by the rising Gulf of Mexico, effectively declaring uninhabitable a coastal area larger than Delaware.”
The state Office of Community Development issued a statement the day after the article appeared, denying that such a plan was being finalized. In the statement, OCD Executive Director Pat Forbes said community meetings in several coastal parishes “produced a wide range of ideas proposed by the community, not the state,” and that Louisiana is “still a long way from developing any policies, but we are starting the discussions in the right place – with the communities who will be most affected by these changes.”
