BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – Louisiana has owed millions of dollars to residents whose homes were flooded due to interstate construction for years, but lawmakers remain reluctant to pay even after a proposed settlement agreement appeared within reach.
After the state built Interstate 12 across a watershed four decades ago, more than 1,000 residents of Tangipahoa Parish in southern Louisiana saw their homes and businesses flood or completely wash away in a 1983 flood. They sued the state for negligence and won, with the courts finding that the transportation department had failed to conduct a proper analysis and their construction caused 1.8 to 2.1 meters of flood in the city of Robert.
The attorney reports that in 2006 the Louisiana Supreme Court finally sentenced the state to pay the victims $ 91 million in redress. But lawmakers have since refused to use the money. Interest rates have skyrocketed and flood victims are now owed over $ 330 million.
Gov. John Bel Edwards, a native of Tangipahoa, signed a preliminary settlement agreement with families this year to pay out $ 130 million over five years while the treasury was overflowing with cash. But senators suggest they may not have to pay the families at all.
The flood victims are angry and say they have been ignored for far too long.
“They take our tax dollars – which they owe us – and spend them on more influential people than the poor people who lost everything,” Todd Morse, whose childhood home was inundated in the 1983 flood, told The Advocate.
The House has allocated $ 30 million in its budget for the first installment of the settlement. But Senate leaders cut that payment to $ 15 million – and said they may have found a reason to dodge the commitment altogether. Senate President Page Cortez, a Lafayette Republican, pointed out an obscure 1946 bill that he said could overturn all court judgments against the state that are over 10 years old.
“We have legal opinions that said you may not even owe that judgment,” said Cortez.
Even without this law, the legislature does not have to pay the judgment if it does not want to, because state courts cannot force the legislature to accept funds.
Still, Edwards’ top attorney Matthew Block told the newspaper that if lawmakers don’t want to pay the flood victims, they should just say so and “be honest with the people who waited 38 years” rather than digging obscure law as a Justification.
Senate finance chief Bodi White, who handles budget laws in the Senate, said he was nervous about the precedent set by the payment of such a major court ruling. He pointed to a pending lawsuit by Livingston Parish residents who claim a 30-kilometer concrete barrier on I-12 acted as a dam during the catastrophic floods in 2016.
“I don’t know if the state can make everyone healthy every time we have a flood,” said White, a central Republican. He said he believes the victims deserve compensation, but there is no “great will in the rest of the Senate”.
Rep. Bill Wheat, a Ponchatoula Republican who urged the initial payment of $ 30 million to be included in the budget, said he hoped anyone who pointed out the 1946 Act to Relieve Legislators from Debt , would understand, “this is not the way we do business”. . “
“The state was absolutely, 100% responsible for this. It is our responsibility to make these people healthy, ”said Wheat.
The storm that hit the region in 1983 was not particularly uncommon for southern Louisiana. But the I-12, built in 1975, looked like a dam that backed several meters of water from the Tangipahoa River to the nearby city of Robert. Before that, the area was rarely flooded and few homeowners had flood insurance.
“Even so, I still have nightmares about this flood to this day,” said Devona Milton, a flood victim. “You can’t just sweep that under the rug. It took the lives of many people. “