re: Gating canals in houma area

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If I'm paying for it, I'm using it.

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I'm paying for the levees to protect land from flooding, I SHOULD GET TO USE IT ALL!

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If we can't use it, then why bother?

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You can use all the public lands and the lands that are open access by the land owners.

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You don't respect the law, yet you want it changed to fit your ways? Seems like you have a poacher/trespasser's mentality anyway.

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You're choosing to ignore the debate and in stead you try and use hot-button words like poacher or trespasser. As if I am some sort of criminal. Ridiculous.

I don't care if the law gets changed. If it doesn't then your shite will be open water anyway an you will be left paying property taxes in the hopes that one day someone will find oil or gas.

What I don't understand is your flippant dismissal of the fact that public funds are being used to protect your private interests. So as long as you don't give a frick, then why should I?

Your tax dollars are saving the marsh so that it provides storm protection for further inland land. Not so you can fish it. Just as others have said that it is used for levees, but you can't just go do what you want on a levee (someone has the right to that land, go try driving up and down the levee for a while, someone is going to stop you). Hell, your tax dollars pay for the town hall, state capital, white house....let's just go walk into those places and use them up. Tax dollars subsidize farmland. You should be able to go pick all the produce you want for free.

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Do you think you could articulate to everyone who isn't a land owner or lease holder that they are confined to the couple hundred thousand acres of WMA marsh?

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This isn't how it currently exist so quit making it so.

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All the while their tax dollars are going to help restore and slow erosion on YOUR private property that in large was caused by YOUR man made canals?

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Do you have proof that it was caused "in large" by the canals?

There are so many tax payer projects that are available to small groups. Also, just because you pay into the tax pool you can't say that your dollar directly impacted a project and if so you're such a small contributor to the overall amount that you are a small percent of a small percent of the funding.

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Your tax dollars are saving the marsh so that it provides storm protection for further inland land.

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So? You think sea walls aren't a thing? I know a dutch guy who would like to have a chat with you.

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Hell, your tax dollars pay for the town hall, state capital, white house....let's just go walk into those places and use them up

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Last time I checked, I was free to go all those places.

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Tax dollars subsidize farmland. You should be able to go pick all the produce you want for free.

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Don't be fricking stupid. My tax dollars payed for I-10, that doesn't mean I can go take a chunk out of it with a sledge hammer.

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Yes. Criminals aka guys like you

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Ok. Call the police. I don't know what else to tell you.

I just don't see how you can play the model sportsman/conservationist card while you blatantly advocate trespassing

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Ok. Call the police. I don't know what else to tell you.

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Don't need to. Our gate has proven to be pretty much impenetrable.

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Do you have proof that it was caused "in large" by the canals?

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Are you kidding?

LINK /

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a U.S. Department of Interior report says oil and gas canals are ultimately responsible for 30 to 59 percent of coastal land loss. In some areas of Barataria Bay, said Turner at LSU, it’s close to 90 percent.

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From 1930 to 1990, as much as 16 percent of the wetlands was turned to open water as those canals were dredged. But as the U.S. Department of the Interior and many others have reported, the indirect damages far exceeded that:
Saltwater creeped in
Canal systems leading to the Gulf allowed saltwater into the heart of freshwater marshes and swamps, killing plants and trees whose roots held the soils together. As a side effect, the annual supply of plant detritus — one way a delta disconnected from its river can maintain its elevation — was seriously reduced.
Shorelines crumbled
Without fresh sediment and dead plants, shorelines began to collapse, increasing the size of existing water bodies. Wind gained strength over ever-larger sections of open water, adding to land loss. Fishers and other boaters used canals as shortcuts across the wetlands; their wakes also sped shoreline erosion. In some areas, canals grew twice as wide within five years.
Spoil levees buried and trapped wetlands
When companies dredged canals, they dumped the soil they removed alongside, creating “spoil levees” that could rise higher than 10 feet and twice as wide.
The weight of the spoil on the soft, moist delta caused the adjacent marshes to sink. In locations of intense dredging, spoil levees impounded acres of wetlands. The levees also impeded the flow of water — and sediments — over wetlands during storm tides.
If there were 10,000 miles of canals, there were 20,000 miles of levees. Researchers estimate that canals and levees eliminated or covered 8 million acres of wetlands.

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LINK

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Dredging canals for oil and gas exploration and pipelines provided our nation with critical energy supplies, but these activities also took a toll on the landscape, weakening marshes and allowing salt water to spread higher into coastal basins. Sea level rise, subsidence, storms, and invasive species add further stress.”

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You can't use those places as you'd like just because you pay tax dollars. You can take a tour, but you can't use them to your own discretion. I know it's not apples to apples, but just showing that tax dollars go to tons of things and you don't have a right to it because of that.

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So? You think sea walls aren't a thing? I know a dutch guy who would like to have a chat with you.

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This is mostly what I'm seeing with the whole "tax dollars" being used to save marsh. Building a bunch of levees mostly. But even if you don't look at it that way, you would destroy an enormous ecosystem (on private land or not) if you didn't attempt to save the marsh. No one would let that happen. That's why anyone cares to provide public money to it.

Again, I agree with you on the destruction part of it. I'm pissed at the way a lot of the marsh is left by those who own it. If they are fined, I wouldn't care. I just think we have to realize that it is in fact private land. We are lucky to be using what amount of it we get to use now. The sense of entitlement to it is only going to make those who own it more likely to close up shop.

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his whole argument is based in the fact that people are so familiar with using certain areas for their recreational fishing. Pretty much all marsh is private land and if anyone wants to keep you out of 95% of it, they can. But we are so accustomed to no one caring or putting in enough effort to actually keep people out, we have several generations who feel like they have the right to the place because they've always done it.

You can 100% argue that private canals are damaging to the marsh and if you want to take that up to a state level and demand that those who created and own them pay up, that's fine. But it doesn't give you the right to use them.

The whole "no other state deals with this" argument doesn't work all that well, because name another state that has private canals like this. Most states probably won't let someone cut up the wetlands in the first place.

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