Makaelyn Lavigne does not want to leave.
From her small hometown of Modeste, in Ascension Parish, Lavigne, 20, commutes every week to undergraduate classes in New Orleans. She’d much rather drive over an hour to school than move away from the beloved, predominantly Black community where her family has lived for decades.
She is the fifth generation of her family to live in this white clapboard house in Modeste facing the grassy Mississippi River levee. She sleeps in the same room her grandfather grew up in, shaded by sprawling oak trees, and spends her spare time rescuing dogs with her mom. Her grandmother is legendary environmental justice advocate Sharon Lavigne.
“We take care of each other down here,” Makaelyn Lavigne said on a recent afternoon, as she sat on a bench at the Modeste playground, sugar cane fields stretching away behind her. Her memories are of a community built around families and nature: “My grandpa dug a pond for us when we were younger so we could fish. We go tracking bobcats in the woods. They have eagles that nest across the river.”
Today, eagles above Modeste fly through some of the country’s most polluted air. Unprecedented petrochemical buildouts have changed Lavigne’s paradise. Her grandmother, Sharon Lavigne, a retired schoolteacher, has garnered worldwide attention with her ongoing battles against companies like Formosa and CF Industries. But the Lavigne family – and hundreds of others in Modeste – may soon be forced to leave their homes as petrochemical companies push to build a massive multi-corporation chemical industrial park that could turn Ascension into “Ammonia Parish.”
The targeted stretch of land abuts neighborhoods and homes like the Lavigne’s. To clear the way for the project, called the RiverPlex MegaPark, companies eyeing the development have begun to hire real estate firms. The firms have already made buyout offers to some residents, including Ashley Gaignard, a resident of Ascension Parish and campaigner with Rural Roots, who described them as low-ball offers.
But in October, Gaignard found a way to throw up some roadblocks in the march towards industrial development. Rural Roots is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit – inspired by a Caddo Parish lawsuit by Attorney General Liz Murrill herself. It challenges whether a parish council’s votes are legal if members do not vocally vote aloud.
Gaignard is trying to block the rezoning that allowed this massive industrial expansion in Ascension Parish. But four firms have already drawn up proposals for the Modeste buyout, while road crews are creating access roads for some facilities that begin construction next year. Besides Gaignard and her lawsuit, the only thing standing in the way of the MegaPark now are locals: residents here own some of the land surrounding the large-scale development.
If the widespread buyout moves forward as planned, it stands to change life here forever: it could essentially destroy Modeste and part of nearby Donaldsonville, displacing up to 800 residents. “It’s just very disheartening to see how they’re so willing to displace an entire community,” Lavigne said.
Ascension Parish Council did not respond to emailed questions about the buyout plan.
Residents are left faced with an impossible choice: those who refuse the buyout could be surrounded by industry belching harmful ammonia.
Ascension ranks high in the nation for air pollution
Ascension Parish sits in “Cancer Alley,” the 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that’s home to a high concentration of petrochemical sites and carcinogenic pollution. The parish is among the top 10 counties in the country for air pollution: the CF Industries plant in Donaldsonville is the nation’s single largest toxic air polluter by pound, averaging more than a dozen unauthorized discharges per year.
Just upriver from Donaldsonville sits Modeste: a small but historically important unincorporated community, surrounded by sugarcane fields and agricultural land.
Centuries ago, the community was home to the plantation Babin Place, which in 1911 was purchased by a Black benevolent society that renamed it New Africa Farm. The society opened rural schools for children around Modeste. Later still, the farm was the home of Leonard Julien Sr., the Black inventor of the sugarcane-planting machine.
Now, said Lavigne, the town of Modeste is home to many grandparents, mostly Black and working-class people. As with many rural areas across the nation, young people often leave town in the face of dwindling job opportunities, leaving behind villages that are mostly made up of elders, who yearn for a local job market that could once again sustain their kids and grandkids, instead of the depressed agricultural economy.
Those realities can make it tough for places like Ascension Parish to fend off industry – even if it comes with waves of new pollution, potential leaks, and explosions.
Modeste faces its own hurdles. As an incorporated community, its voters did not get a say in the election of Donaldsonville Mayor Leroy Sullivan, one of the key boosters of the new industrial park.
Like the entire Ascension Parish Council, Sullivan supports the new development. The promised economic boom is the draw for him, though he is clearly aware of the dangers, as a survivor of a 2000 explosion at the Donaldsonville CF Industries plant that killed a contractor. Burned across most of his body, Sullivan spent 37 days recovering in a burn unit. His hands, Lavigne said, still bear the scars.
Gaignard doesn’t understand how any Ascension Parish leaders entrusted to protect their residents can open the door for the industrial park. “The same people that you went knocking on their door for a vote, these are the same people now saying, ‘You got to move. You have to go. We don’t have a place for you to go. All we know is you need to go,’” she said.
Ascension Parish plans to build the sprawling RiverPlex MegaPark industrial expansion across 17,000 acres. When completed, Modeste will be surrounded by heavy industry. Ammonia production in the area could more than quadruple.
Ultimately, it’s a choice between leaving a cherished community and living next to what could be Cancer Alley’s densest source of pollution yet. “They’re telling people it’s a choice, right? ‘If you want to go,’” Gaignard said. “But we all know it’s not safe to live that close to three industries being right on the next side of your fence.”
Beyond the current CF Industries facilities, the proposed park would add an ammonia plant from Clean Hydrogen Works, a Hyundai steel plant, a “blue” ammonia plant from CF Industries and multiple Japanese companies. The term “blue” ammonia is the term used for ammonia produced using “carbon capture,” a disputed technology that purports to capture carbon from smokestacks. Though it is positioned as a way to cut carbon pollution, by either storing it underground or using it to produce more oil, many environmental advocates warn that it only provides cover for polluters.
Ascension Parish and the state of Louisiana are helping to fund the park and related road and rail expansions using a $600 million taxpayer-funded incentive package.
Laying the groundwork for Modeste’s buyout
In May, the Ascension Parish Council approved a resolution to begin exploring a buyout for more than 200 residents. In August, the Council put out a call for firms to develop a Relocation and Buyout Plan.
Four firms submitted bids in response, vying to lead Ascension Parish’s buyout. As of November, none of the firms had been awarded a contract, but The Lens obtained their applications through public record requests.
All four firms have Louisiana ties. One firm, Grant Management Group, is partnering with Middleberg Riddle Group, who count New Orleans City Councilmember JP Morrell as counsel. Another, Ahearn-Alecha Architecture, is led by Matthew Ahearn, founder of New Orleans’ Irish Cultural Museum; their rates for the proposed work are up to $250 per hour.
The other two firms – Timbalier Resources and Desire Line – list partners who count previous work on the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles as among their qualifications.
“Our team members developed a deep understanding of the sensitivities inherent in requesting families to transfer ownership of property held for generations,” Desire Line wrote of the Isle de Jean Charles project.
That resettlement has been critiqued for the tribe’s loss of self-determination, cultural displacement, and substandard housing at the new site.
To complete the buyouts more quickly, some of the MegaPark companies have hired real estate firms directly, who are already making insultingly low offers to residents, Gaignard said.
“They’re giving buyouts, but the buyouts are really not worth the property,” she said. “I have one gentleman that has their house on an acre of land, and they were offering $150,000. And they’re in their 80s, and they’re like: ‘Where can we go and buy a house [for that low a sum?]”
The offer is less than half the median sale price of a home in Ascension Parish, according to realty website Redfin.
Gaignard said she’s particularly concerned for vulnerable elders in her community, who would struggle if relocated.
Challenging the rezoning
The first steps towards the industrial park’s development came in 2015, when the Ascension Parish Council adopted an ordinance creating the 17,000-acre West Bank Industrial Overlay District. The ordinance made it much easier to rezone land around Modeste from “conservation” to “industrial.”
Developers have been treating that industrial zoning as a given. Even as the rezoning process is challenged, the Ascension Economic Development Corp. advertises the industrial future of the RiverPlex MegaPark.
In August 2025, the Ascension Parish Council voted twice in two weeks to rezone parcels of land for the MegaPark. On August 7, by approving two agenda items, the Council gave industrial zoning to more than 3,400 acres of conservation land in the area planned for the RiverPlex MegaPark.
But the process was questionable, the Rural Roots suit alleges.
When hearing the agenda item, the chair of the council, Chase Melancon, did not receive an audible “yea” vote from every councilmember. Instead, Melancon asked aloud: “Any questions? Any objections? Hearing none, so moved,” and then gaveled the vote through, after waiting less than a second.
Melancon followed the same process on August 21, 2025, when the Council rezoned over 900 acres of land expressly for CF Industries Blue Point LLC, the planned carbon capture facility.
Altogether, the Rural Roots lawsuit challenges the rezoning of about a quarter of the land intended for the MegaPark.
Low-ball buyout offers
Jack Green, a campaign manager with Rise St. James, first learned about the Ascension Parish buyout because Modeste residents were so upset that they drove to St. James looking for help from Rise St. James’ founder, Sharon Lavigne.
Green believes developers are deliberately “building a bunch of industrial access roads right now and using eminent domain to cut up the current housing there.” He thinks this will make it easier for developers to “intimidate the residents into accepting a buyout they don’t want to accept.”
The access roads dividing the neighborhood, as described by Green, are likely in service of the Hyundai Motor Group’s $5.8 billion steel plant, which will begin construction in 2026. Earlier this year, Hyundai executives raised concerns with Louisiana Economic Development about the company’s need for expanded and accelerated road construction in Ascension Parish. The state responded that it was reviewing options to speed up the area road improvements.
Green sees the early buyout offers as part of a broader plan to short-circuit community opposition in Modeste. “There is a coordinated effort,” he said, “between the parish, the state, these industries, and some very, very wealthy real estate firms, to intimidate and get residents out and prevent any kind of solidarity between the residents.”
Hyundai is one of the companies that has jumped ahead to make buyout offers outside the Parish-approved process.
Law firm Kurz & Hebert sent a letter on behalf of Hyundai to Donaldsonville resident Paul Troxclair, who shared it with Green.
“We realize that [address] is your primary residence and want to be sensitive to that,” the August 27 letter reads. “As a result of Hyundai’s experience, they realize their industrial development could negatively affect the neighbors and the value of their property in the future which is the reason behind the offer.”
Hyundai offered Troxclair $395,000, he said, for his two adjoining properties, which together have a market value of $366,700, according to the Ascension Parish Assessor’s Office. But while the offer is 8% above the assessed value, Troxclair said he’s made improvements to the property and added value since it was last assessed in 2024.
Troxclair also knows from first-hand experience that the cost of displacement is far higher than the market value of property: he has been displaced once before, six years ago, from Iberville Parish. That time it was for an expansion by Shintech, a Japanese chemical manufacturer.
Besides the actual costs of moving, some things can’t be packed up nor replaced, Troxclair explained. On his family land in Iberville, “we had orange trees, satsuma trees,” he recalls. “Pecan trees that we picked in the yard since we were kids – they didn’t compensate us for none of our trees or anything like that. And I spent 60 years of my life down there. And they got people here [in Modeste] that’s been here a lot longer than that.”
The TJC Group, a consultant group speaking for Hyundai, told The Lens that “as of December 31, 2025, all the land needed for the development of Hyundai’s Louisiana Steel Mill has been voluntarily sold to the state of Louisiana,” and the State will lease it to Hyundai. “Hyundai is not currently working with Kurz & Hebert or any other real estate firm.”
This summer, Gene Landry, Mekaelyn Lavigne’s grandfather, was also among those who received an offer. His offer, also from a firm representing Hyundai, was so low he threw it away, he said. And even if it were fair, he said, he wouldn’t want to leave a place that has been in his family for more than 100 years.
Black Modeste residents vulnerable
Beyond their fears of low buyout offers, Modeste residents are vulnerable in other ways. Some who face displacement are renters, not homeowners. Others face property-title hurdles that are themselves the legacy of racism.
Land successions are difficult for big families. Ownership can end up spread across numerous extended family members, and so one hold-out cousin can stop or delay a sale. Untangling property rights can be nearly impossible for land that has been held in the same families for generations as society and its laws changed around them. “Those people don’t have a title, or it has been tied up between so many family members because they are the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers living there,” Gaignard said.
Industrial development in Cancer Alley is disproportionately concentrated in majority-Black areas like Modeste.
Public opinion is likewise split along racial lines. A recent survey in Ascension and St. James Parishes, commissioned by Sierra Club’s Delta Chapter, found that 65% of Black respondents are “very concerned” about toxic air and pollution in their community, as opposed to just 24% of white respondents. Asked whether local and state elected officials are doing enough to protect the public’s health from pollution, 40% of Black respondents strongly disagreed, compared with just 17% of white voters.
Though some jurisdictions designate areas for conservation purposes to protect natural habitats, Ascension Parish for decades kept the farmland within the MegaPark-site zoned for “conservation,” to prevent the historically Black area of Modeste from building up subdivisions, Gaignard said. If that was the intent in Ascension, it would follow national trends. Similar exclusionary zoning designations were made across the country, and supported by the federal government after World War II, as Black soldiers returned home and the modern Civil Rights movement began.
But the Ascension Parish Council changed course in 2015, when it created the Overlay to quickly make way for industry.
The legacy of enslavement flows directly into current-day rezoning efforts, Gaignard said. She imagines that local leaders have decided that since “free labor is no longer available, we need to figure out a way to make money off this land,” she said. “And if we can’t get it off sugar cane, we’ll sell it to industry and sell out the people that are left on the land.”
MegaPark companies may cause harm without delivering jobs, advocates fear
The specific companies who’ve set their sights on Ascension Parish – including Hyundai and CF Industries – raise alarms with some watchdogs, who warn that the corporations are likely to harm public health and destroy housing without bringing the promised economic benefits.
Concerns about Hyundai include its use of prison labor in Alabama, which drives down wages in Hyundai’s Southern manufacturing supply chain, according to a November report from Columbia University’s Labor Lab. In the Montgomery area, where Hyundai suppliers are concentrated, auto-supplier wages are 7% to 9% lower compared to similar jobs in Alabama and nearby states, the study found. Hyundai has not indicated whether it will seek to use prison labor in Louisiana.
“If Alabama already depends on incarcerated labor to subsidize Hyundai’s labor costs- with documented lower wages and higher health and safety violations – what prevents that same model from being replicated in Louisiana?” Gaignard said in a statement.
Another RiverPlex MegaPark company, CF Industries, has a plant near Yazoo City in Mississippi that suffered an explosion last month, leading to an ammonia leak and evacuations of nearby residents.
That worries some Modeste residents, because CF’s proposed plant in Ascension would be the largest in the world – three times larger than the Mississippi plant.
“I don’t understand how the same company that just put another community through an explosion and evacuation can now try to convince the people of Modeste and Ascension Parish that building a new ammonia plant is safe,” said Twila Collins, who lives just a mile from the proposed site in Modeste.
The lawsuit and “viva voce”
Gaignard took inspiration for the October lawsuit from a somewhat surprising place: a lawsuit by conservative Louisiana AG Liz Murrill. Both lawsuits challenge a voting approach common throughout Louisiana.
The argument is around the concept of “viva voce,” literally meaning “with the living voice.” It means that legislators must vote by speaking aloud – not with a show of hands, or using an electronic device, or being asked for an objection. The idea is to ensure transparency, as legislators may not vote in silence and thereby escape public scrutiny.
Rural Roots’ suit argues that Ascension Parish Council violated the Louisiana Constitution and Louisiana’s Open Meetings Law by simply asking for objections on the rezoning vote, sidestepping audible votes from every councilmember.
“The Louisiana Attorney General has recently pointed out that Louisiana law requires that voting by parish councils must be ‘viva voce,’” reads the lawsuit.
Murrill used a similar argument earlier this year to accuse Caddo Parish Council of violating the ‘viva voce’ requirement on a much more superficial matter: a resolution welcoming celebrated Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders to Shreveport.
A July vote ratifying “the Resolution Welcoming U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (“Sanders Resolution”) failed to comply with the viva voce voting requirements,” reads Murrill’s suit. “Any form of silent, electronic tallying that lacks an audible, spoken expression by each voting member is insufficient.”
If either is successful, the lawsuits could push other Louisiana parishes to change their voting practices. Currently, the Baton Rouge Metro Council typically votes through unanimous consent. Others, like the New Orleans City Council, vote electronically.
Gaignard and Murrill’s lawsuits could force a change. Bossier City has already dropped electronic voting as a result of Murrill’s suit. The New Orleans City Council is waiting to see how the lawsuit plays out.
Adrian Alpay, one of the lawyers on the Ascension case, told The Lens, “What we’re asking is pretty simple: that the members of the Ascension Parish Council follow state law and the Louisiana Constitution. The public has a right to observe how their government votes.”
If the suits are successful, they could make recent legislative votes vulnerable to challenges: suits filed within 60 days can void votes.
In December, Rural Roots and Bucket Brigade filed two more suits against Ascension Parish Council and Ascension Economic Development Corp. for withholding public records and keeping the deals shrouded in secrecy through non-disclosure agreements.
Gaignard isn’t interested in financial gain, and knows that even if it’s successful, the lawsuits filed around the MegaPark present more of a hurdle than a true roadblock. Still, she wants the councilmembers’ votes recorded. If the Modeste she knows is lost, she wants public records to show who chose to unstitch the fabric of their community.
“I just want accountability,” she said. “I want those leaders making this choice to forever have it in writing…them being the demise of their own community.”
Follow this link for a map of the proposed RiverPlex MegaPark and other Lens coverage of the proposal.
