More than a dozen city officials gathered Monday at a wide empty field in Gentilly, an excavator just a few feet away was ready to start digging into the grass-covered ground.
They were there for the groundbreaking of the long-awaited Mirabeau Water Garden, the first project to begin construction as part of the ambitious Gentilly Resilience District.
The district has been seven years in the making since the federal government awarded millions of dollars to the city in 2016 to address flooding following Hurricane Isaac.
Mirabeau Water Garden will transform a 25-acre lot in the heart of the Fillmore neighborhood. When complete, the garden should be able to hold up to 10 million gallons of rainwater through natural features including a pond, wetlands and vegetation — water that would otherwise inundate nearby streets.
The garden is also meant to be used as an education and recreation space and will include multiple walking trails open to the public.
“So many have waited so long for the birth of this design,” said Patricia Bergen, leader of the Sisters of St. Joseph, moments before blessing the site with holy water. Her congregation provided the land for the new park.
Bergen said the plan for the garden is “full of promise and hope,” not just for New Orleans, but for all the flooded urban areas of the world.
Several other green infrastructure projects are planned for Gentilly as part of an effort to build out the city’s first-ever flood-resilient neighborhood using green infrastructure to bolster New Orleans’ aging system of drainage pumps and canals.
The Gentilly Resilience District includes plans to transform neutral grounds on major boulevards into waterways and social spaces, create a wetland nature preserve next to Dillard University’s campus on the western side of the London Avenue Canal and invest in parks, a playground and drainage in the St. Bernard neighborhood. The ultimate goal is to lessen flooding, extreme heat and sinking land, growing threats exacerbated by human-caused climate change.
“Despite facing multiple challenges, the City of New Orleans remains at the forefront of climate change,” said Mayor LaToya Cantrell on Monday, “We're adapting by focusing on green infrastructure projects like [the one] we're breaking ground on this afternoon.”
The city was awarded $141 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s National Disaster Resilience Competition for the resilience district after Isaac struck New Orleans in 2012. Though the storm only reached a Category 1, it dumped 20 inches of rain on the city and caused severe street flooding.
But despite already having the funding, construction has been slow to start.
“It seems like we’re swimming in money instead of trying to use that money as efficiently as we can,” City Council member Joseph Giarrusso III said at a meeting last week where the Stormwater and Green Infrastructure Department provided an update on the project ahead of the groundbreaking.
Joseph Threat, the city’s deputy chief administrative officer for infrastructure, cited the 2019 cybersecurity attack, the pandemic and Hurricane Ida as some of the reasons why things were stalled.
“Who could do it faster?” Threat said.
Many of the other projects are still waiting for federal environmental clearance to begin construction, according to the Stormwater and Green Infrastructure Department's director, Mary Kincaid.
Kincaid said the department has not yet completed federally-required studies to determine whether some projects could harm historical or archaeological resources located at the sites. The department is pursuing conditional approval from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and from HUD to overcome both obstacles and speed up the process, she said.
City Council members said last week they were concerned how sitting on the funds for years looked not only to the public but also to state and federal agencies.
“The greatest difficulty we have as a city in getting state and national investment in infrastructure work is the amount of time it takes for us to spend money,” said council member JP Morell.
At the ground-breaking ceremony, Cantrell said the completed garden will serve as a proof of concept and could help the city get more funds from the federal government to continue to adapt to the growing risks of a changing environment.
She said the city needs to learn how to better live with water and demonstrate that it can overcome the challenges it’s facing.
“There's so much more that needs to be done and so many more dollars that we have to go for,” she said.
Construction on eight more Gentilly Resilience District projects are scheduled to start in 2024. The Mirabeau Water Garden is expected to be completed by 2025.
