• By ALLEN M. JOHNSON JR.
• Advocate New Orleans bureau
• Published: Sep 23, 2008 - Page: 7A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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METAIRIE — Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard on Monday worried aloud that lingering hurricane debris could be the last straw for residents who are considering moving out of the New Orleans area.

“That’s my greatest concern,” said Broussard, an elected official in Jefferson Parish — the state’s most populous parish — since 1974.

At a news conference called to announce a price increase designed to attract more storm debris clean-up crews, Broussard seemed equally intent on population retention — three years after Hurricane Katrina, three weeks after Gustav and only 10 days after Ike.

“We’re a parish that’s challenged right now,” Broussard said. “We’ve got people knee-deep in mud in Grand Isle with no levees.
We’ve got people in Lafitte that are just drying out, the water is just receding over the weekend. And we’ve got this massive debris cleanup from two hurricanes that hit us as Category 2 (storms).”

The parish’s communities are “psychologically fragile,” he said, adding, that the uncollected piles of tree limbs from Gustav and Ike, also drum up bad memories of Katrina.

“This (debris) creates an impression about our quality of life,” Broussard. “How fast we can move to address these kind of concerns ultimately weighs out in people’s decisions — whether to stay or to go.”

To pick up the pace of collections, Broussard said, he has increased the amount of money paid to Storm Reconstruction Services of Alabama — the parish’s top debris contractor — from $9.97 to $12.23 per cubic yard.

The new rate will not be available to Ceres Environmental Services of Brooklyn Park, Minn., the runner-up for the parish storm debris contract, officials say. Ceres recently won the contract to clear Gustav debris out of East Baton Rouge Parish.

The city-parish contract pays Ceres $7.50 per cubic yard for collection and hauling to area landfills. Gustav generated approximately 1.5 million cubic yards after the hurricane hit Baton Rouge on Sept. 1, according to city-parish estimates.

Since Ike’s bruising brush off the Louisiana coast in mid-September, other communities are paying, from $17 to $25 per cubic yard for debris collection, Broussard said.

Collection rates for storm debris can be deceptive, masking the hidden costs private haulers may have to incur if parish landfills are far away from debris collection routes, according to interviews with both contractors and government officials.

For example, the storm damage from Ike and Gustav in Jefferson Parish is more spread out than the high-volumes of debris that Katrina of 2005 left in Orleans Parish, where Ceres received a $500 million collection contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

In 2006, Jefferson Parish Councilman at-large John F. Young authored a resolution requiring the suburban parish to “pre-bid all these disaster contracts.”