Let’s get it out front that here at The Hayride, we’re generally fans of diversion projects which move Mississippi River water into the marshes of southeast Louisiana.

Where those projects have been undertaken, they rebuild land lost to coastal erosion. They actually do it very quickly.

Here’s a good example which isn’t even a diversion project – or, perhaps better put, it’s a diversion project that the river undertook for itself with no help from humanity…

Neptune Pass is a perfect example of how quickly and effectively allowing the river to spread sediment will build land. Contrary to all the propaganda being spread by fake environmentalists and hustling plaintiff lawyers, Louisiana is losing its marshland because the Mississippi has been leveed all the way to its mouth and doesn’t get to interact with the marsh anymore, and that has thrown things badly out of balance. The natural push-and-pull of the river depositing its sediment and rebuilding the land vs. the ocean’s waves gradually washing away the coastline is gone.

So we like diversion projects.

What we don’t like is pissing money away.

You don’t really hear much about the biggest diversion project of all, the Mid-Barataria Diversion Project, as an example of pissing money away. This thing has been lionized over the years as the mother of coastal restoration efforts, and when Gov. Jeff Landry started coming out in opposition to it there was a whole lot of screaming over his stance.

But it seems that Landry might well have been right to say no to this project. The AP just put out an investigative report which shows this thing to be the worst kind of Louisiana-politics graft-and-fraud boondoggle…

An ambitious project to restore a rapidly vanishing stretch of Louisiana coast that was devastated by the 2010 Gulf oil spill has been thrown deeper into disarray amid claims by Gov. Jeff Landry that his predecessor concealed an unfavorable study that it was feared could imperil the $3 billion effort.

It’s a controversy that was even predicted by the previous administration as it grappled with how to handle conflicting environmental analyses for the project, according to a confidential memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The nine-page document, prepared by five attorneys working for then-Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration, sheds new light on a study Landry says was improperly withheld from the public and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as it was approving a permit for the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

The stakes were so high the attorneys even weighed whether state officials could face federal charges for withholding from the Corps a report that the diversion would generate significantly less land than another modeling projection used in a federal review.

We’re so old we remember when the Mid-Barataria project was only going to cost like $1.6 billion. Now it’s $3.2 billion. And we find out from the AP report that Edwards and his people blew past this impact study which said the diversion project would do as much harm as good.

Why? Pretty obviously, because Edwards wanted to be the guy doling out the contracts for that $3.2 billion. And if they’d hit the brakes on the project and properly digested that study, then the whole thing would have fallen to Landry and the engineers and consultants who threw big campaign bucks at Edwards wouldn’t have gotten their rewards, now would they?

Are we too cynical?

Maybe.

Then again…

Prosecution seemed “extremely unlikely,” the lawyers wrote to the heads of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which oversees the diversion project, but they added that “the severe consequences and criminalization of the action warranted mention.”

The attorneys also warned that the Corps might suspend or revoke the permit if it discovered the study after the fact, the 2022 memo shows, foreshadowing actions taken last month when the Corps cited “deliberately withheld” information among its reasons for suspending its permit for the project. The move halts construction despite more than half a billion dollars already spent.

“They hid the bad stuff and only showed the (Corps) the version they liked,” Landry wrote in a post on X. “Science is easy when you just delete the inconvenient parts!”

Edwards denied his administration withheld information from the Corps and said “Gov. Landry’s accusations are demonstrably false.”

“When all the facts are presented, the public will see that his administration has played political games and botched this important project,” Edwards said in a statement to AP.

Landry countered in his own statement that “the facts speak for themselves.”

Amid the finger-pointing, conservation proponents have called the report in question a red herring that Landry is using to tank the project. The diversion, funded mostly from a settlement arising from BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, is the largest of its kind in Louisiana’s history.

John Bel Edwards says Jeff Landry botched this project.

Oh, OK.

You were governor for eight years and this thing doubled in cost, and you didn’t break ground on it until the last year you were in office, and that came after a study which said it wasn’t going to do any good, and it’s Landry who botched the project?

Really?

For $3.2 billion there could be a half-dozen diversion projects rebuilding the land in several spots in southeastern Louisiana. And yes, all of it would be paid for by BP’s Deepwater Horizon settlement. It’s hardly an all-or-nothing proposition with this one project.

Edwards is the guy responsible for throwing all the eggs into this one basket which had already run through a half-billion dollars before even making sure it’s the right move.

But a whole lot of folks have gotten rich off it already. Those hogs have fed plenty at the trough. And the Army Corps of Engineers has suspended the project – not because they’re convinced this study is a particular bombshell but because they now think Louisiana’s government is full of liars and thieves and they’re not sure it’s a good idea to throw money at projects which are based in lies.

The memo noted the Corps and other federal agencies could delay the project for years if they attempted to integrate the modeling results into their environmental impact analysis. Failing to formally disclose the modeling results to federal agencies like the Corps, the attorneys warned, also would leave the project vulnerable to litigation.

They suggested the Edwards administration “informally discuss” the issue with federal agencies and then strategize the best way to “formally” enter it into the public record for the agencies to review.

The report’s findings eventually were verbally communicated to at least one Corps official, who indicated it was insignificant, according to multiple former Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority officials familiar with the exchange. But the complete analysis itself was not submitted into the public record, nor was the official’s response at the time, they said.

The former state officials weren’t authorized to discuss internal deliberations and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.

Col. Cullen Jones, head of the Corps’ New Orleans District, told Landry’s administration last month that the Corps recently conducted a “technical review” of the modeling analysis in question and concluded it “would not affect” the permit.

But Jones said the Corps suspended the project’s permit in part because “the State deliberately withheld information … that the State knew it should provide.”

We’ve said before that John Bel Edwards would turn out to be the gift that keeps on giving to Louisiana – and not in a good way. This is a perfect example – Edwards left a mess of a project that Landry now has to dig out of, with a billion and a half dollars of cost overruns, the likely necessity of spending tens of millions of dollars a year having to dredge out the mid-Barataria diversion channel in order to keep the thing alive, and now a blown-up relationship with the Corps of Engineers because Edwards’ people lied about that study.

And for what? To have his hand on the money spigot coming out of that project for as long as he could.

This is the kind of thing somebody ought to go to jail for. The attorneys were openly discussing it in that memo, though there was a lot of whistling past that graveyard: “oh, it’ll be fine, but maybe it’s a risk that we’ll get pinched for this.”

If the Trump Justice Department wants to take a scalp or two and opens an investigation into Edwards and his cronies for what they did here, that wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.