local fisherman. That's our biggest 

 fear. Over any type of federally- 

 funded projects, how much can the 

 local community input and control the 

 effects that are basically theirs? 



Answer : (from the panel) the 

 idea behind these projects is to, in 

 the long term, increase the overall 

 availability of areas suitable for 

 things like growing oysters. Over 

 the years the salinity intrusion has 

 gradually shifted the areas suitable 

 for growing oysters inland. If you 

 really divert large amounts of fresh- 

 water from those areas they are going 

 to be destroyed but in the long run 

 the idea is to have a larger area 

 available and increased overall pro- 

 duction. But if you do have these 

 mass amounts of freshwater diver- 

 sions, you are going to wipe out some 

 areas that presently exist. In some 

 way those people will have to be com- 

 pensated. But it's long-term, over- 

 all benefits that are being looked 

 at. You'll have, theoretically, a 

 much larger area available for those 

 types of things than you do now. 



Question : It's been my experi- 

 ence that there was little local in- 

 put into most of the planning of the 

 Corps of Engineers and other federal 

 projects. Were local people pretty 

 well excluded from a lot of the nego- 

 tiations in this case, or was it well 

 publicized, or what was the case? 



Answer : (from the panel) I 

 haven't been affiliated with these 

 studies that long and I'm not even 

 familiar with when the last public 

 meeting was held. I know that some 

 of the guys from Fish and Wildlife 

 Service have been involved a lot 

 longer than I have, and can address 

 that, relative to when the last 

 public meetings were held down in 

 Plaquemines Parish. If they would 

 be kind enough to bail me out. 



Comment : Scott Nixon, Rhode 

 Island. I can't resist after hearing 

 all of this to make an unpopular ob- 

 servation. And that is when we hear 

 there's too much freshwater over on 

 one side, and then there's not enough 

 on the other side and the Corps has 

 done all this work of building dams 

 and levees and moving the water 

 around, we want them to build more 

 and move it around somewhere and bail 

 us out because we screwed that up and 

 we've got problems with the water 

 quality. And maybe that will work 

 and maybe that won't, but I'm struck 

 by hearing all of this this morning 

 that when each of these projects was 

 undertaken we had a glowing report as 

 to what it was going to do for us. 

 And yet we find afterwards that there 

 were all sorts of fallouts that we 

 hadn't anticipated and now we've got 

 all kinds of other problems and we 

 want to do another six projects to 

 get us out of that one. And 

 my impression from reading the lit- 

 erature is that we really don't 

 understand these systems and there is 

 a tremendously complex environment 

 in coastal Louisiana to make a really 

 compelling case. That we know what 

 is going to happen if we put fresh 

 water here, there, or somewhere else, 

 and that some of the cost-benefit 

 calculation that must go into doing 

 the kinds of freshwater studies rest 

 on the assumption of what we're go- 

 ing to get in terms of fisheries 

 yields for moving the freshwater 

 somewhere else and promoting one 

 kind of wetland over another one. 

 And, at least, in that area we 

 really don't have a good case for a 

 lot of those linkages that people 

 are supposing are there. Somebody 

 mentioned Gene Turner's paper to- 

 day, but that's an awfully slim 

 kind of evidence to bring forward 

 for spending millions and millions 

 of dollars of Federal money. So an 

 outsider to Louisiana, I'm not all 



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