Just gonna leave the spillway open all the time now

It's another January high river season.

“This morning, the National Weather Service forecast has the river getting to 15.1 feet here at the Carrollton gage,” Roe said. “We are watching that very closely. Trigger point for phase 2 flood fight is 15 feet and rising so we are seeing if that forecast is going to come in a little bit lower of a little bit higher and we will make a decision of whether to go into phase 2 based on that.”

On Jan. 9, the Corps entered its stage one flood fight following the river’s rise to 11 feet. Roe said the high river is due to heavy rain to our north that is now making its way to the coast.

In recent years, flood fights in January have been followed by springtime openings of the Bonnet Carre Spillway to relieve pressure on levees from New Orleans south.

2019 was an absolutely devastating year for oyster fishers on the Louisiana coast.  It would be a while before they'd begin to recover either way. But now they face the prospect of going through it all over again.

Meanwhile, in  other flood control news, just as the corps of engineers begins public discussions of necessary upgrades to our perpetually sinking levee system, the big question we've been worrying about for over a decade is coming to a head.  How do we pay to maintain the system we have?

The multiparish dispute is complicated by many factors, but the principal one is that the Lake Borgne levees protect parts of Orleans and Jefferson parishes in addition to St. Bernard. The agreement calls for St. Bernard to bear most of the cost of maintaining them, and many residents and officials see that as unfair.

The parish’s residents have twice voted down a proposed 7.5-mill property tax that would have raised new money for levee maintenance. St. Bernard residents already pay an 11.33-mill tax that mostly goes to levees. Had the new tax passed, the various levee district millages would have been reallocated, with 15.4 mills going to levee maintenance and 3.43 mills transferred to the parish for drainage.

That’s more than St. Bernard’s neighbors pay their local levee districts: New Orleans residents pay a little over 10 mills for levee maintenance, and East Jefferson property owners pay just 4.02 mills. However, New Orleans residents also pay 16.23 mills for drainage, and Jefferson residents pay between 4 and 5 mills.

The parish governments and flood protection authorities each have their own pots of money and constituencies, but, as we all know very well, they're really maintaining one big interdependent system. So, even under the wholesale reorganization of the regime after Katrina, there will always be disputes like this to deal with.  Apparently, there is a fix in the works, albeit a potentially problematic one.

CPRA officials said Wednesday they plan to submit a bill in the upcoming legislative session that would address such funding disparity issues for both the east bank and West Bank regional levee authorities. The legislation might allow the authorities to set regional tax rates to pay for levees' operation and maintenance.

I'm very curious to see more about how that works.  I assume it still means that tax rates have to be authorized by voters in one way or another.  Or maybe not?