With the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico choked off for more than a month now, many questions remain in the public square concerning the long-term impacts of the BP oil spill.
Is seafood safe to eat? What are the long-term environmental impacts? When will the deepwater drilling moratorium be lifted? How will local fishermen [...]

Council could consider override this week
In Plaquemines Parish, the council giveth and the council taketh away.
In its latest move to shake up the parish’s legal team, the Plaquemines Parish Council voted at its July 22 meeting to impose a 20 percent pay cut on the position of lead parish attorney. The salary reduction would drop [...]

For the first time a major maintenance plan will be in place to improve water traffic and in addition, the dredge material will be beneficially used to protect marinas.  The marina maintenance dredging costs are covered by FEMA as the result of harbors silted in from recent hurricanes.  To compliment the marina dredging in an [...]

For the most part, Bonnie turned out to be the kind of tropical storm people in Coastal Louisiana always hope for. It weakened, then fizzled, and finally disappeared.
But despite Bonnie’s collapse, the threat of a storm was enough to bring oil spill response efforts largely to a halt over the weekend.
With Tropical Storm Bonnie gaining [...]

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser convened a Gulf Oil Crisis Summit July 21 to reach accord on long term strategy for the BP oil spill cleanup and more efficient communications to promote the recovery of the people of coastal Louisiana from the April 20 oil disaster.
Nungesser invited Governor Bobby Jindal and coastal parish presidents Steve [...]

Representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals held a public meeting at the Buras Auditorium July 13 to discuss their ongoing efforts to monitor air and water quality in Plaquemines Parish in response to the BP oil spill.
Overall, the report regarding air and water quality was positive, according [...]

So many Plaquemines residents and business owners squeezed into St. Patrick’s New Life Center last week, extra chairs were set up behind the speaker’s table.  The crowd came to see Kenneth Feinberg, the man President Barack Obama selected to administer the $20 billion set aside by BP for claims.
Feinberg, who is best known as Special [...]

By the time Plaquemines Parish Council Chairman Don Beshel gaveled the council’s July 8 meeting to a mid-afternoon close, the council had, with little fanfare, affected significant change on the makeup of the parish’s legal team.
In two votes, the council impacted three of the parish’s attorneys – terminating one, promoting another, and placing a third, [...]

A dead-in-the-water effort to issue $18 million of revenue bonds to finance improvements to the non-federal levee between Braithwaite and White Ditch on the Eastbank of Plaquemines may have found new life through a resolution passed at the Plaquemines Parish Council’s June 24 meeting.
But the financial implications of the bond proposal and the resolution’s questionable [...]

Parish President Billy Nungesser joined other state and local elected officials June 23 to fire back at the federal government for halting the cutter dredge California from building oil-blocking sand berms near the Chandeleur Islands.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, at the behest of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the Department of [...]