BP reneges on deal to rebuild oyster beds, repair wetlands, Louisiana officials say

By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune
February 21, 2011 BP has reneged on promises made in November to negotiate early payments to Louisiana to help rebuild oyster beds, repair damaged wetlands and build a fish hatchery to allow the state to respond immediately to the collapse of commercial fisheries in the wake of the BP Gulf oil spill, state officials said Monday. Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority chairman Garret Graves and Department of Wildlife & Fisheries director Robert Barham said the state will instead scramble to find millions of dollars to begin the work itself, then bill BP for the costs. “BP has clearly changed their approach,” Barham said. “All we’ve asked is for them to do what they said they would do in their commercials, be here for the long haul and make it right.” Instead, he said, the company has clearly moved from a public relations strategy to one focusing on litigation over whether damage to the state’s oyster beds was BP’s fault. The state contends that its decision to open many freshwater diversions along the Mississippi River to full blast at the height of the oil spill kept oil from entering the oyster beds, though the fresh water killed the oysters, requiring the beds to be restocked with cultch, oyster shell deposited beneath the water on which oyster larvae grow. “Their response today was that we see no evidence of oil injuring the oysters,” Barham said. U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., had asked BP to pay $15 million for new oyster cultch, and even that would not have been enough money to restock all the beds that were damaged in St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson and Lafourche parishes, he said. Wildlife & Fisheries is financed by license fees, with little help from the state budget. And those fees were another casualty of the spill that BP has not acted on, Barham said. “We had made a claim for lost recreational license sales and BP had, quote, agreed to pay $2.5 million for our loss of license revenue back in December and we still haven’t received a dime,” he said. The reason is that the state has refused to sign an agreement with BP that would release the company from liability “for everyone they’ve ever done business with, an impossible release for us to sign.” …