09/14/2003     

River's Need Run Long: Tax Sought to Keep Vermilion Restoration Efforts Flowing 
By RICHARD BURGESS
rburgess@theadvertiser.com

LAFAYETTE — Employees of the Bayou Vermilion District spend a lot of time just keeping the trash and trees out of the river.

They’d like to be doing a lot more, said Director Kerry Collins, but there’s only so much money, so many hours in the day and so many people. “We know what needs to be done,” he said. “It’s just a matter of doing it.” The district will ask voters on Nov. 15 to approve a 0.45-mill property tax to support a wide-range of restoration projects, flood-control efforts and improvements to parks and boat launches along the Vermilion River.

The Bayou Vermilion District was created in the 1980s to address water quality in a river once considered one of the most polluted waterways in the nation, a victim of sewage, agricultural run-off and wastewater from factories. Twenty years later, Collins and others say the major problems have been addressed, though swimming is still not recommended, and there is still work to be done.

“Water quality has made tremendous strides since the Bayou Vermilion District began. If you go back to the condition back then, it was scary,” said naturalist Bill Fontenot, curator of the Acadiana Park Nature Station. The 119 acres of bottom-lands hardwood sits on the edge of the river.

Collins said there are no more major industrial polluters, but plenty “of little things” that need to be addressed, such as the smaller septic systems that are not up to health standards and urban waste flowing from streets and yards. But some of the major projects left undone have more to do with the effects of concrete and rain. Most of the water that falls on Lafayette during a heavy rainstorm rushes to the Vermilion because there is so much concrete that the water has no other place to go. And once in the river, the water has few places to go except up because work long ago cut off the areas it overflowed for relief.

The rapid rise the rain brings causes flooding, as well as erosion along the river’s edge. Some developers are required to build retention ponds to hold the water back from the river until the rain subsides, but a more large-scale effort is needed, said Lafayette City-Parish Government Assistant Director of Public Works Bill Campbell.

“We need regional retention facilities. We have to come up with larger areas for retention,” he said. Collins said that some of the bond money would be used to partner with private developers to build more retention ponds.

Another chunk would go to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project that reconnects the river with wetland areas that could serve as “natural” retention ponds, as they did before the areas were cut off from the river by levees, Collins said.

Wetlands also help filter pollutants from the water. It all works hand in hand,” Collins said. Other planned projects include planting trees and shrubs along the river’s banks to help halt erosion. Collins said that less erosion would mean less dirt in the water, which would make the river more hospitable to fish and other aquatic life.

But perhaps the most noticeable problem to most residents has been the trash floating down the river. “All the trash that people throw in a ditch in this parish eventually ends up in the river,” Campbell said.

Becky Longman, whose backyard on Camellia Drive slopes down to the river, says she has to pick up trash brought into her yard by the rising river after nearly every heavy rain. “It’s seems to have gotten worse,” she said. “People just throw their trash in there.”

Besides the usual litter, Bayou Vermilion District workers spend a lot of time hauling out tires, washing machines, refrigerators “or whatever else someone throws in,” Collins said. Collins said that some of the money from the proposed tax would help make that job a bit easier. One proposal calls for structures that would prevent logjams at bridges that take a lot effort to clear, Collins said. Another calls for equipment to make it easier to unload trash from the district’s barges.

“Right now we have to haul it up the bank — barrel by barrel, tire by tire,” Collins said. “Simply by improving what we do, getting equipment to make it more efficient, we can do more without additional operating funds.” A separate tax funds the district’s general operations, supporting an annual budget of about $500,000 and a staff of eight.