$4b plan to reduce flooding in the Amite river basin

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New drainage pumps to the Mississippi River.

Clearing out sediment blockages in the lower Amite River and snags and high spots in Bayou Manchac.

Building a large, multibillion dollar reservoir somewhere in St. Helena and East Feliciana parishes or even southern Mississippi.

The Amite River Basin Commission, a Baton Rouge regional agency most tied to the long-running Comite River Diversion Canal, has aimed big with its first master plan.

It proposes nearly $4 billion in projects to tackle flooding in the Amite River Basin, a watershed that is home to more than 75% of the nearly 902,000 people in the greater Baton Rouge area.

Refashioned by the Legislature a few years ago to include the elected leaders of seven parishes drained by the Amite, the commission has developed a list of 13 projects.

Some are long-discussed, already funded and under local government direction, while others are still concepts on paper with big price tags but not the dollars to match, or court controversy, like the idea of a big upstream dam.

Taken together, the projects would store, reroute or block floodwaters caused by upstream rains and backwater flooding in the river basin. The plan also would preserve existing swamps to maintain flood storage, restore the upper Amite to its more natural, winding flow after sand-and-gravel mining has straightened the route over the years, and clear sediment blockages in the lower Amite.

The 2,200-square-mile basin, which reaches into Mississippi, encompasses Louisiana's largest parish by population, East Baton Rouge, and two of the state's fastest growing, Ascension and Livingston.

If all of the projects are completed by 2050, commission officials say the plan would cut expected annual losses from flooding by a little more than half when adjusted for inflation, from $550 million in 2025 to $265 million in 2050.

Paul Sawyer, executive director of the commission, said the nearly $4 billion figure, a small percentage of which is funded, doesn't make him "blanch at all" but reflects the reality of the problem.

He pointed out that the historic 2016 floods resulted in $10 billion in federal assistance and project funding, including the dollars to build the remaining phases of the previously stalled Comite Diversion. The economic and societal disruptions from those floods cost billions more, he said.

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