Police jury moving ahead on Cow Bayou

The Richland Parish Police Jury is moving ahead with plans to clean up Cow Bayou in the hopes of cutting down on flooding in the area.

The newest effort involves using an $800,000 grant from the Office of Emergency Preparedness to fund some of the work. To move this forward, jurors are getting papers signed in order to show the roads affected by flooding from Cow Bayou.

Unfortunately, Police Juror Judy Green said, some people don’t want to sign the papers.

“Some people are refusing because they’re afraid FEMA will come in and reassess the flood plain and make everyone buy flood insurance,” Green said.

Police Jury President Jesse Washington was skeptical that $800,000 would be enough to solve the whole problem.

“I’m going to tell you right now you’re not going to get very far on $800,000,” he said.

For the moment, however, the emphasis is still on surveying property owners and getting them to sign up so that the OEP can show the extent of the flooding.

Jurors all agreed this needed to be completed as soon as possible in order to get the funding and begin work on cleaning out as much of Cow Bayou as possible.

A greater source of controversy in the on-going efforts to alleviate flooding concerns a culvert beneath Ollie Morris Road as it crosses Cow Bayou.

Landowners represented by Harold Gallman would like to see more than one culvert under the road.

Gallman explained that the road originally crossed Cow Bayou via a wooden bridge. When the bridge was ripped out and replaced with a single six-foot culvert, this caused the water to back up and flood residents to the north of the road.

Gallman wants the jury to add two more culverts to the crossing, bringing the flow back to where it was before the bridge was removed.

“I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to know when you take a 50-foot channel and bring it down to one culvert, the water’s not going to flow,” Gallman said.

“If you put more openings, the water will flow faster,” Police Juror Ken McKay agreed.

And that, Green said, would be the problem. Increasing the flow of water at that spot would flood people on the south side of Ollie Morris Road because the water would drain too slowly.

“It would hurt other people,” she said.

Juror Ronnie Gilley said that seemed to be what happened when the culvert was put in.

“The people south of there already flooded, so we put a damn so it would flood the people to the north?” he asked.

Green said she was concerned the channel had become silted in and there was no place for the water to go if the new culverts were added.

McKay agreed the channel would have become silted in because the flow of water was dammed. However, he pointed out, once the flow was increased again, it would wash that silt back out and widen on its own.

The next step would then be to open up a place for the water go to at the south end, rather than trying to hold the water to the north.

“Why wouldn’t we want to help the people to the north?” Gilley asked.

Green said she wanted to help people on both sides of the road but felt it would be best to wait until an engineer could come up with a comprehensive plan.

Gallman said he thought the decision had been made in November when the jury agreed to add the culverts. Parish Manager Joey Evans said he recalled this as well and had the work planned.

Green said she didn’t recall voting on the matter. This led to a discussion where some jurors said they remembered the vote and others didn’t. Secretary-Treasuerer Kathy Burns said she couldn’t find a record of the vote in her minutes.

This led to a new vote in which jurors decided to move forward with adding additional culverts to Ollie Morris Road.