A jury found that the defendants didn’t violate Joy Banner’s right to free speech or the Louisiana Open Meetings Law. But testimony revealed a hatred the Parish President harbors against the co-founders of The Descendants Project.
Joy Banner of The Descendants Project brought the lawsuit after the Parish Council chairman threatened her with prosecution and imprisonment for speaking during the public comment period of a 2023 meeting.
Louisiana secured the bill’s largest project authorization, for St. Tammany Flood Risk Management. New Orleans scored authorization for a study about salt water in the river.
The Descendants Project sues, contending that public officials had no right to forgive Greenfield’s grain-elevator-project debts.
In the Holy Cross Neighborhood, residents obtain Port emails showing that a modest grain terminal at the Alabo Wharf includes more phases—and now includes crude sunflower oil, shipped in from Turkey.
Though Councilmembers were swayed by job creation, critics said that the jobs pale in comparison to the rate increases and environmental effects that Orleans residents will now shoulder.
Though the Biden Administration backtracked its support of a cap on plastic production only a week before UN negotiations begin in South Korea, Louisiana advocates see the tide turning on plastics in a way that could turn future plastic-production facilities in Louisiana into even riskier investments.
A decommissioned oil rig site off Grand Isle offers a new shallow-water template for the Louisiana Rigs-to-Reef programs. Where rigs once stood, the 3D-printed concrete could create bustling coastal reefs.
The Port of New Orleans plans to “revitalize” the Alabo Street Wharf into a terminal for organic grain. Neighbors in Holy Cross are concerned about grain dust, pests, rodents and a steady line of railcars passing right outside their doors.
Lifelong residents of St. James Parish will speak in federal court on Monday about how parish officials and ordinances have, for generations, explicitly directed industrial plants into predominantly Black neighborhoods.
