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 Becky Gillette |
I still think the commission should be more inclusive, and that these meetings should be open to the public, but there are some major logistical problems. It may be hard to believe, but there aren't any large meeting rooms left here on the Coast.
To get to this meeting, I had to go through two National Guard roadblocks. A trip that would normally take me 15 minutes took nearly an hour. Much of East Biloxi is devastated. There are a couple of casino barges that crossed over Highway 90 during the hurricane, and most of the housing is gutted. The ground level of the building the meeting was held in is still under repair. The walls are partly gone, so you can see out to the sound. The concrete floors have been stripped of carpet. It felt like being in a war zone.
The first meeting was jammed to capacity with media, about 47 members of the governor's commission, 150 architects and planners, and 150 or so elected officials. People were standing in the back. The meetings aren't being broadcast, but I saw that it was all being taped. I'm going to suggest that copies of the tapes be put at the public libraries. Those that remain.
I listened for three hours and came away more hopeful for the Mississippi Gulf Coast than I have been since Katrina hit. At one point my jaw nearly dropped to the floor. Anthony Topazi, president of MS Power Company, chairing an infrastructure committee, was making the same kind of environmental recommendations you would expect to hear out of the mouths of Sierra Club members.
There was very little said yesterday I couldn't agree with, and I was surprised at what has been envisioned. Things like: Moving the train traffic that currently runs through our most heavily populated areas to railroad tracks further north, then turning the existing railroad into light rail; moving Highway 90 off the beach to parallel the present railroad tracks; building an inland port to get all those multimodal shipping containers off the water, so they don't turn into torpedoes again during the next storm; and building an inland seafood processing park, since these facilities don't need to be located on the water anymore. (Most of the shrimp processed comes from foreign countries, and we don't need that processing wastewater dumped into Back Bay of Biloxi without treatment.)
There was also talk of a waterfront boardwalk, and stronger, safer housing, priced so that moderate income people aren't pushed out of the market. There was discussion of having a plan in place next time to make beneficial use of downed timber, instead just burning it. There were even some "out of the box" ideas like constructing a monorail from Stennis Space Center to the Pascagoula River to promote ecotourism.
Of course, there were also some important things that weren't discussed, like the need for energy efficiency and conservation, what to do about toxins from major refineries and chemical industries on the waterfront, and how to stem the controversial high-rise condo boom we were seeing before the storm. But overall, I found this meeting to be very energizing.
The governor's commission is purely advisory, but the decision-makers are far more likely to listen to the Barbour team than they are the Sierra Club and other environmental groups. But after hearing so many good ideas at the meeting, I thought, If they want to do our work for us, I'm quite happy with that!
I talked with environmental attorney Reilly Morse afterward. He said he thinks this storm radically changed some of the viewpoints of many Coast leaders. Before, when we fought against wetland fills for development, we were often outgunned by people who favored bulldozers. Now we have all had a huge lesson in the importance of not building in the flood plain, in building more hurricane-resistant structures, and in not putting development and people in harm's way. A lot of the things that are good for the environment are also safer for people and even the Coast economy. We can’t afford to rebuild every few years. And I was pleased to hear leaders say, "There will be another hurricane, so we have to be prepared."
Becky Gillette is co-chair of Sierra Club's Mississippi Chapter.
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Photo: Mark Muhich/Sierra Club collection; all rights reserved.
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