Although Louisiana has utilized several million dollars in funding granted by the Federal RESTORE Act, several parishes, including Iberia Parish, have left money on the table.

Like many of Louisiana’s parishes, Iberia Parish hasn’t utilized Bucket 1 money from the Federal RESTORE Act for use in environmental or developmental projects.

According to a recent “half-time report” published Jan. 2, 2024 by TRPR, a Washington D.C. based consulting firm, tracked the money awarded to Gulf States impacted by the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. This money came from the Resource and Ecosystem Sustainability, Tourist Opportunities, and Revived Economies (RESTORE) of the Gulf Coast States Act , which passed in 2012. It allocated 80% of the Clean Water Act fines from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to parishes and counties in the Gulf Coast States.

One primary aspect of the RESTORE act, is that it splits the nearly $8 billion into several funds for parishes to use on specific economic and environmental rejuvenation projects. One of the funds, the Bucket 1 Fund,however, has no real limit to its uses.

In the nearly 12 years since the act passed, not a dime of this fund was spent in Iberia Parish, nor most of the parishes across the state. This money has been left to “compound” interest in the U.S. Treasury.

The Bucket 1 funding is allocated based on a schedule drafted and submitted by each state, and groups can apply for projects from this interest-bearing account directly on the Treasury website.In total, parishes across Louisiana have only spent a total of nearly $23 million of the $61 million gross allocations available under the Bucket 1 fund. Iberia Parish alone received $1.5 million dollars in allocations, none of which have been touched.

Louisiana trails behind other states for using the Bucket 1 fund, yet leads in every other Deepwater Horizon RESTORE category. Louisiana has used over $5 billion of money granted by the RESTORE act towards a variety of projects, including the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project, various Louisiana Outer Coast Restoration projects, and the Terrebonne Basin Island and Beach Nourishment Projects.

Unfortunately, inflation exists, and now it’s continuing to rise at a rate which far overshadows compounding interest rates. This is doubly true in the construction world, where much of this money could be best used. Inflation rates for construction is around 20%. According to “environmental analyst” Timothery Richard, a construction project in Florida with an approved budget of $12 million, 3 years ago, reapproved the budget at $21 million, a staggering 75% higher.

We are no stranger to this concept in Iberia Parish. Across the parish, major projects for companies like First Solar and Fusion One are seeing expedited construction to avoid those rising costs.

Scott Cross, the director of land developments at Cross Land Investments out of Dallas Texas, has led projects across the state. He started following the RESTORE funding in 2011, following the act’s initial launch.

Following the approval of Texas’s timeline in 2017, Cross submitted a $15 million budget for a project utilizing funds allocated by the RESTORE act funding. He received half of that money, some $7.5 million and leveraged $5 million in matches.

Last year, he received a grant contract to bring to commissioners court for review. From there, he executed his grant administration, and just last month, he was able to select an engineer to start work on the design.

According to engineers working with Cross, the inflationary rate for construction projects is increasing at a rate of about 1.7-1.9% per month, so as the years have progressed and the project is held up, Cross believes he will only accomplish a small portion of their initial goal.

“Based on where that budget was with construction cost, construction supplies and materials, I will be lucky if I can achieve somewhere between 40 and 50% of what I planned to do originally. That is how the construction cost, engineering cost and material cost has inflated such. We’ve been at this for years now and haven’t been able to turn a spade of dirt. It has been such an arduous process that I haven’t even entertained going back and requesting additional dollars,” Cross said.

One issue Cross has encountered, which he believes has hindered the timeline of projects across the south, is a misunderstanding of what the funding is. He explained to his own county commissioners that the money doesn’t come from the taxpayers, but rather comes directly from BP.

“What puzzles me about that is that, here we have a source of revenue that could be put to good use for the public taxpayer no matter what state they are in, and nobody’s checking in on their implementation. I’ve never had a single federal or state elected official come and ask me, ‘Well Scott, what’s broken, what’s working, what’s not working?’” Cross said.

Cross said he believes the funding should be managed by agencies like National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or Wildlife and Fisheries, both of which have long term experience managing multi-million dollar projects. He also believes funding from the RESTORE act should have operated similarly to funding from the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA).

Under GOMESA, there is no application process and an allotment is given to coastal political subdivisions alongside the Gulf Coast states over several years for five authorized uses. Since 2017, Cross has seen yearly allotments as low as $500,000 to upwards of just over a million through GOMESA.

“I’ve always wondered why the RESTORE program couldn’t follow that same model, because it would be much more efficient, and the dollars that were awarded for projects would long since be executed. My project would be done by now,” Cross said.

According to Stephen Barnes with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Blanco Public Policy Center, major public infrastructure and restoration projects are usually planned in an abstract way with little regard to the calendar timeline. These projects often require major review to ensure they are effective public works.

“We should pursue that type of due-diligence with the mindset that time is money,” Barnes said.

Barnes said prolonging the time before construction causes two major drawbacks. First, they will simply cost more to accomplish, and second, it will take significantly longer for the public to start reaping the reviewed benefits.

When it comes to the RESTORE act specifically, that review process was followed to ensure money from different buckets of funding found their appropriate usage. While well-intentioned, that inevitably created a burdensome bureaucratic process, which paired with the slow allocation of funds have seriously inhibited the extent of projects achievable with the funds.

According to Louisiana federal Representative Garret Graves, lawmakers are currently working with the Gulf States and their parishes/counties on bi-partsian legislation to streamline the application process for the RESTORE Act to ensure effective use of funding.

“The bureaucracy resulting from the RESTORE Act is preventing resilience and ecological restoration projects from being implemented. The goal of the law was not to create a federal bureaucracy, but to ensure civil penalties are properly invested in impacted communities,” Graves said.

Millions of dollars have been left on the table across Louisiana, and according to Ricahrdson, the best way to combat it will be to ensure our lawmakers understand the issue and introduce legislation to change it.