As it twists through Plaquemines Parish south of New Orleans, the Mississippi River frequently swings within 400 yards of the coastal marsh. Walking on the river levee with oceangoing tankers at their backs, visitors can see anglers catching reds in the maze of wetlands just shouting distance away.
To the casual observer it's a fascinating scene, two worlds so close they almost touch. But to coastal scientists it's the picture that might be painted on New Orleans' tombstone.
The marsh is dying after being starved of sediment and fresh water from the river for decades, and scientists now say the Gulf of Mexico could be lapping at New Orleans suburbs in 10 years, a tragedy whose costs would dwarf the bill delivered to the nation by Hurricane Katrina. The medicine that could prevent that death -- river sediment -- is right next door, and marsh-building projects planned decades ago show it could easily be piped to places where it's needed to reverse erosion and saltwater intrusion.
Yet what should have been a quick sprint over a short distance to save the coast regularly turns into an endless marathon through a maze of property rights issues, coastal workers say.
Publicly financed projects to prevent southeast Louisiana from being swallowed by the Gulf often are slowed to a crawl and in some cases stopped in deference to the property rights of the very landowners the projects are designed to protect, state officials said. And if Louisiana ends up losing its battle against the Gulf -- forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents -- respect for the property rights of a few could well be a major contributing factor.
"It's always about land rights, land rights, land rights," said Luke LeBas, a coastal engineer at the state Department of Natural Resources, when talking about the years-long process of getting even small projects online. "I listen to the scientists and others talk about what needs to be done and how quickly we can do it, but they don't live in the real world that I work in."
In that world, said LeBas, the newfound consensus among state scientists calling for urgent action to save the coast is a welcome but naive development. Advocates of efforts to reverse coastal erosion have long slammed the intricate and time-consuming federal approval process for water projects. But fights over property rights may well prove to be the bigger hurdle to quickly launching the massive engineering projects needed to move silt from the river into the marshes, LeBas and other state officials said.
The issue of the state "taking" private property to rebuild the coast exploded onto the public's radar in 2002 when judges in Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes awarded local oyster fishers more than $1 billion in damages the harvesters claimed had been caused by the Caernarvon Freshwater Diversion Project -- originally built to improve oyster grounds and strengthen wetlands against erosion. The award was eventually overturned by the state Supreme Court, but it had the effect of freezing progress for two years, state and federal officials said.
Most land-rights issues facing coastal workers are more mundane, but almost as time-consuming, experts said.
Because almost every acre of coastal wetlands is privately owned, even a project designed to rebuild land in open water typically must first cross the properties of several different owners before piped or free-flowing sediment reaches its objective. And resistance can be intense, notwithstanding the state's willingness to pay for easements for the duration of the project, which can be 25 years or longer.
Helen Hoffpuir, land section manager at the Coastal Restoration Division of DNR, said the challenges faced by her full-time staff of four are familiar to most land title investigators. It's just that there are so many pieces to the puzzle and so urgent a deadline for completing it.
"It's not unusual for one piece of property to have several owners, and we have to get each of them to agree," she said. "One project crossed 57 different tracts of land and we had to get easements from 300 people. And if just one of those 300 doesn't want to sign on, it can bring the project to a stop."
Most property owners readily cooperate, with some even donating valuable easement rights, Hoffpuir said. But others react in unpredictable ways that can stall projects. Many property owners support projects, but have a fear of signing the required legal documents. Other agreements can fall apart on personal quirks.
"I have gone to meet with a willing landowner, but when he saw the federal partner on the project was the Environmental Protection Agency, everything changed," she said. "He escorted me to the door and told me never to let my shadow darken their property again."
Everyone involved in title work, she said, knows to "expect the unexpected." But coastal Louisiana also presents her staff with a challenge unheard in other states: Surface and mineral rights switch between private and state ownership as erosion turns land into open water -- and restoration projects turn open water back into land again. With the state attempting to rebuild some of the 2,000 square miles of wetlands that have become open water over the past 70 years, that is a critical issue.
The basic rules of the game, according to state officials:
-- Water bottom and mineral rights transfer to the state when land becomes open water.
-- When the state rebuilds eroded land, surface rights go to the state and the state negotiates mineral rights with the landowner, usually at a 50/50 split.
The state typically needs a landowner's approval to rebuild his land because the project will almost certainly impact the owner's remaining land, either crossing it or using the eroded shoreline as a base.
"That's usually not a problem, because in most cases the landowner could never afford to rebuild the lost property," Hoffpuir said. "People are only too happy to have their property rebuilt or protected using state or federal money."
But not always. Some landowners may think the state is offering too little for an easement or might disagree with the state's engineering solutions.
Those objections have stopped about 10 percent of the 164 federal-state Breaux Bill projects in southeast Louisiana, Hoffpuir said. None of the projects for the western half of the coast were stopped. The list includes freshwater siphons and marsh restoration in the wetlands around New Orleans, an area coastal scientists say the state has only 10 years to salvage. In a few other cases projects have had to be downsized due to landowner objections.
But overall, Hoffpuir and others involved in the process said, the challenge is less landowners refusing to cooperate than the logistical nightmare of needing to secure so many agreements in so short a time, with so small a staff.
"This is the process we have to work with," she said, "and it just takes a lot of time."
Yet worried state coastal officials admit to asking the obvious question: If missing that 10-year deadline could result in the devastating consequences foreseen by many coastal scientists, should the state move forward without landowner permission?
There is a long tradition of governments expropriating private property if the owners are deemed to be blocking projects critical to the public welfare. And nearly every politician in the state -- including Gov. Blanco -- says the threat to southeastern Louisiana is an emergency. But Louisiana's governors and Legislature have been loathe to cross that line, partly due to a belief in the sanctity of property rights, but also because experience has shown cooperation is usually quicker than the legal process of expropriation, officials said.
The Legislature already has granted DNR a "quick-take" authority for levee construction and projects on barrier islands. The process allows DNR to proceed with a project after putting the estimated value of easements in an escrow account. Final payments are then decided in court.
To outflank recalcitrant landowners in all other coastal projects, the state would have to resort to expropriation. That means waging and winning a court fight before land can be seized, a procedure that can stall a project for years as the case winds through appeals.
And the powerful Louisiana Landowners Association has signaled it won't make that an easy choice.
In comments filed on the state's proposed coastal master plan the LLA voiced strong support for rebuilding the coast -- and its members' lands -- with large river diversions and other projects, but objected to the plan's intention of limiting development on wetlands.
Further, the LLA fired a warning shot about any plans for expanding "quick take" authority: "The apparent goal of quick-take authority is to avoid the debate over whether the rights to be taken are excessive or even necessary. The enactment of quick-take procedures in the context of coastal restoration and protection is offensive to LLA and its members who have devoted so much time and effort for so many years."
Despite the looming disaster, the state is not eager for that fight.
"Taking someone's property is about the most severe thing a government can do to one of its citizens," said Sidney Coffee, Blanco's executive assistant for coastal affairs and chairman of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
"We have talked about it. We talk about it at almost every meeting, because we know this is not just an emergency but a dire emergency. So I can't rule it out. We know we're running out of time, and we can't let anything stand in our way.
"But I'm not aware of any bills from the administration or legislators that would extend quick-take or otherwise address this issue."
Two conservation groups, the Nature Conservancy and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, are discussing the creation of a charitable land trust to speed the process. Under this model, landowners would donate their property to the nonprofit trust for a tax credit but keep future mineral rights.
"By doing this in advance of the federal and state approval process for projects, you could save years and million of dollars," said Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy. In the meantime, coastal officials struggle against the clock with the system they have.
Even low-cost projects that require little engineering, such as using pipelines to carry silt from the river to the marshes across a narrow stretch of land in Plaquemines Parish, must navigate the delicate process of gaining landowner consent.
Coastal scientists consider pipeline transport of sediment the fastest and most economical means of quickly rebuilding wetlands. Kerry St. Pe, director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, has lobbied for building a web of pipelines to carrying sediment to the northern reaches of the rapidly eroding Mississippi River estuary.
An engineering firm that designed the proposal classifies the west bank of Plaquemines Parish near Myrtle Grove as a "slam dunk" area for success, St. Pe said, because the distance from the river to the wetlands is so narrow.
But LeBas said expectations for that project already have collided with reality. He has spent more than 30 months lining up permits and landowner permission for a pipeline to carry sediment from the river near Myrtle Grove to wetlands in the area of Bayou Dupont.
Logistically it seemed like a simple project, LeBas said: Using a dredge to dig sediment from the river bottom, then routing it through a single pipeline to the nearby marsh. But he had to navigate a maze of approvals, including:
-- Permission from the Army Corps of Engineers to take sediment from the river bottom because doing so might have an impact on shipping lanes.
-- Agreement from Conoco-Phillips about the location of the pipeline moving through its large refinery near the site.
-- A decision from the state Department of Transportation and Development on how to cross Louisiana 23.
-- Permission to cross the property of landowners on the other side of the highway as well as permission from owners of the eroded land that will be rebuilt.
"In this case, everyone has been cooperative, they're all on board with this and want to see it done," LeBas said. "But we're still talking about a process that has taken more than two years. If we didn't have that kind of cooperation, it might take five years -- for a simple project."
Once completed, the project should build 500 acres of marsh in six months, LeBas said.
"Actually building land in the marsh (with a pipeline) takes no time at all," LeBas said. "That's the instant grits of coastal restoration."
But getting hot water to the grits has not been simple.
"The controlling issue is always land rights," LeBas said. "That part can take years -- and even then it might not happen."
Bob Marshall can be reached at email@example.com or (504) 826-3539.