Construction is already underway on a $185 million expansion of the Koch Methanol plant in St. James Parish, but environmental groups continue fighting in court to stop the project.
The activists argue that in signing off on the deal, the Parish Council did not sufficiently weigh potential damage from the plant's pollution against its economic benefits.
"We are full and fed up," said Romeville resident Barbara Washington, a founder of one of the plaintiff activist groups. "We have had enough of them telling us about jobs and the economy when our health is suffering. What we see, is wealth taken from our community and just smog and stench as caravans of cars come and leave out of the parish."
But parish and Koch attorneys say the groups have misread and misapplied the parish's land use laws and engaged in "hyperbole" over the expansion's pollution levels and its possible health impacts on its neighbors.Â
A Koch spokesman said company officials were confident that the "court will affirm the thorough work our team did to meet all federal, state, and local requirements on this project."
The legal battle is the latest twist in a case that community groups say has galvanized opposition to new industry in the Mississippi River corridor between Ïã¸ÛÁùºÍ¿ª½±ÀúÊ·¼Ç¼ and New Orleans.
Both new local activist groups and national environmental organizations have challenged several projects in that area in recent years. They argue the area, which they call "Cancer Alley," already has more than its fair share of pollution, disproportionately harming Black, low-income communities.Â
The area where Koch is located is in the 95th percentile nationwide both for toxic air emissions and for lifetime cancer risk from toxic air pollution, according to mid-2023 federal data.
But both federal and state regulators say overall toxic, particulate and smog-forming air pollution have been on the decline parishwide for nearly 25 years.
Stop a project underway?
About 20 contractors have been working on the western St. James site between River Road and La. 3127 for several weeks. They have been working on an ethane line that has emerged as a key element in the land use fight and have also been installing piping in pipe racks, a company spokesman said.
Work on steel supports and excavation for a vaporizer skid and piping supports is expected to start next week.
"Concrete to be poured in coming weeks on the vaporizer foundation," the spokesman said in a statement.
Even as work proceeds, the lawsuit asks a state district judge to consider whether the parish broke its own rules for approving the project and must start the process over again.Â
A ruling isn't expected for more than a month, as Judge Cody Martin has asked attorneys to submit briefs on questions left after a hearing this week.
A ruling for the plaintiffs would raise the potential of stalling the project, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys said.
Washington, who is descended from a slave who bought property in the area after emancipation, is a founder of Inclusive Louisiana, who sued the parish in late October to block Koch from proceeding.
The lawsuit from the plaintiffs, who also include Rise St. James, local resident Beverly Alexander and local church Mount Triumph Baptist Church, came about a month after the Parish Council vote.
A hearing on the merits didn't come until Monday in Convent, however — 3½ months after state regulators granted an air permit and cleared the way for construction.
In a news conference before the hearing, Washington accused parish and state officials of turning the rural 4th and 5th Districts of northern and central St. James into a "sacrifice zone" that has harmed the health of families and neighbors and provided jobs to people outside the community.
The expansion, which will boost Koch Methanol St. James' production capacity by 25%, will retain 114 jobs and add two permanent jobs and 400 construction jobs and contribute $4 million dollars to parish coffers over the next 10 years.
Methanol is a chemical building block for a variety of uses, including plastics, adhesives, plywood, paint and pharmaceuticals but is itself a toxic chemical.
In connection with that expansion, combined toxic air pollution would double, while ozone-forming chemicals would rise by half to more than 80%, permit applications say. Levels for combined particulate emissions, which can contribute to respiratory and cardiovascular problems, would rise by about a quarter, state filings show. Ammonia and methanol are the major toxic emissions.
State regulators say even with the increases, localized air pollution levels wouldn't exceed state or federal standards. Even with 95th percentile in cancer risk nationally around Koch, that elevated risk remains about in the middle range of what federal regulators consider acceptable.
In court, attorneys for both sides delved into whether the Parish Council applied the correct level of scrutiny on Koch's application last year. At that point, the application approval had been appealed to the council from the Planning Commission, which had adopted it unanimously.
The plaintiffs' attorneys with Tulane Environmental Law Clinic argued the council should have applied the parish's highest level of review because the new ethane line is running through wetlands outside the primary plant footprint. That higher level of review would have required the council, and not just the Planning Commission, to consider key factors, including this economics-versus-environment balancing.
Attorneys for the parish and Koch, however, disputed the plaintiffs' reading of the law, saying a lower level of review was correctly applied and only the Planning Commission had to consider the balancing and other factors, which it did.
The council served as a quasi-appellate layer with discretionary authority.
