Gerald Blessey provides insights into the Mississippi Sound Coalition’s vision toward win-win solutions during the public comments segment of the Coastal Protection & Restoration Authority (CPRA) Board Meeting on Feb. 21, 2024.

Transcript:

I’m Gerald Blessey. I’m the Counsel and Manager for the Mississippi Sound Coalition, former Mayor of Biloxi. The Sound Coalition is the combination of the city and county governments, commercial fisheries and tourism industry on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The 2019 Bonnet Carre opening, as you probably know, killed all of the natural oyster reefs in the western Mississippi Sound. They’re still dead. It killed 10% of our dolphin population, and it created, because it was the longest that went on into the summertime, an algae bloom that ended up closing our waters and our beaches. And so it killed the tourism season.

So we’re going to participate very actively in the Lower Mississippi River Comprehensive Management Study and we invite you and the Corps to join us in looking for win-win solutions to the management of the Mississippi River. By that, I mean, of course, flood protection, coastal restoration and protecting the environment, including the Mississippi Sound because we’re directly affected.

I want to comment briefly, Mr. Chairman, that the Mid-Breton Diversion concerns us, just as it does Plaquemines Parish. We do have science from the Northern Gulf Institute—that’s Mississippi State and the University of Southern Mississippi. It [the science] shows that the Mid-Breton Diversion will ultimately have the same devastating and long-term, permanent impact on the Mississippi Sound.

It’s peer-reviewed science, it changes the salinity forever. And once it becomes changed, as you know, if you go below five parts of 1000 salinity, it kills the oysters. They’re not coming back. So, my point is that we really want to see win-win solutions. We are very concerned about, of course, the Bonnet Carre and Mid-Breton, but we think the whole lower Mississippi River the whole concept must be rethought.

Surely, we can find in this great country of ours, the best minds in America to figure out how to do these win-win solutions. And we offer our hands in friendship. We try to do that, Mississippi and Louisiana together.