[StBernard] St. Bernard Parish spends hundreds of thousands and still can't get bulk ice to docks

[Westley Annis]

St. Bernard Parish spends hundreds of thousands and still can't get bulk ice
to docks

wwltv.com

Posted on July 1, 2013 at 10:30 PM

Updated yesterday at 10:31 PM

Mike Perlstein / Eyewitness News

Email: mperlstein at wwltv.com | Twitter: @mperlstein

SHELL BEACH, La. - Ice is a precious commodity among commercial fishermen in
St. Bernard Parish. And since Hurricane Katrina, it's been a scarce one.

"It's sort of like white gold. Cold gold," explained F.J. Campo, owner and
operator of Campo's Marina in Shell Beach. "If you have a boat that holds
any amount of ice, you can't get any down here. You can't fill it up. You
can't get what you need."

The bulk ice shortage makes it even more difficult for parish officials and
fisherman to swallow the local government's expensive - and unsuccessful -
plunge into the ice business.

One plan was to take over a towering private plant, Amigo Ice House, near
the Bayou Loutre Bridge. The area was devastated by Katrina's floodwaters
and the owners of Amigo never reopened. So in August 2011, the parish
secured a community development block grant to resurrect the icehouse and
paid $282,000 for the building and the land.

Even then, the prospect of the parish competing with local ice suppliers
drew a mixed opinion from the local fishing community.

"I don't see where the parish should have gotten into an icehouse. At all.
It makes no sense," said longtime shrimper Nicky Mones. "It was a bad
purchase. Economically, it was a terrible purchase."

Mones was among those who thought the parish should have looked for a
private operator instead of competing against local businessmen.

The idea was hatched under the administration of former Parish President
Craig Taffaro. When Taffaro was defeated by current President Dave Peralta
in late 2011, the building remained untouched.

Former St. Bernard Recovery Director Michael Dorris said that when the
previous administration launched the icehouse project under the strict
guidelines of the federal grant process, it looked like a winner.

Dorris said the plan was hatched with required community input, as required
by the grant, and the engineering firm hired to oversee construction
determined that repairing the old building would be feasible and
cost-effective.

But when construction bids came in significantly higher than expected -
beyond what was approved in the grant - the parish went back to the drawing
board.

"You can only go on the best information at the time from the experts you
hire to advise you," Dorris said. "When I left the previous administration,
the engineer said it was smarter to repair rather than replace the
facility."

A subsequent engineering review revealed some bad news: the previous plan to
refurbish the old icehouse and put it back into commerce was not
economically feasible.

That left the project in limbo.

"What the engineering firm concluded was that it would actually be cheaper
to start from scratch and build a new house, rather than try to use the
existing platform to retrofit that for a modern icehouse," parish Chief
Administrative Officer Jerry Graves said.

As Graves and the new administration studied what it could do with the
crumbling eyesore, they discovered more bad news. Federal CDBG block grants
must be used for the original stated purpose, or the money has to be
refunded.

"It had a pretty sizable price tag on it as well," Graves said. "We're kind
of married to the property now, and we're going to make the best of it, but
as far as the logic in selecting that property originally, I'm not really
sure where the previous administration was going with that.

Now the parish is looking into using the land to build an icehouse from
scratch, but only using the plant during emergencies such as a flood or
hurricane.

"We're not happy that we're stuck with the building or the property, but
again, we're going to make the best of it and go forward with this emergency
facility," Graves said.

But the icehouse wasn't the parish's only misadventure in the ice business.

After Katrina, Shell Oil Company donated two industrial ice machines to the
parish to help the local seafood industry get back up and running.

By the time Taffaro was elected to guide the parish's post-storm recovery,
Dorris said the two machines were located at a parish maintenance yard on
Paris Road. After some repairs, the machines were briefly put into operation
at the road yard.

But the location, far from the fishing villages of the lower parish, was
impractical. Commercial fishermen rarely used the ice, so the administration
decided to move the machines to seafood docks along the bayous at Hopedale
and Delacroix.

Parish records show that the machines were leased to two local seafood dock
owners at no cost, but the machines were never hooked up and never used.

Graves said that when he went looking for the machines on behalf of the new
administration, he found that they had been destroyed during Hurricane Isaac
in August 2012.

Campo said the machines, which were housed on top of steel shipping
containers, never stood a chance.

"Isaac comes along and they wind up in the marsh somewhere," Campo said.
"They're gone, basically gone. Destroyed. And we still have no ice."

Graves said the destruction of the machines by Isaac eliminated one
last-ditch idea by the parish to resurrect the Amigo icehouse by placing the
new machines on the roof of that old building.

"The ice machines being destroyed pretty much put a damper on any prospect
of that happening," Graves said.

Parish records show that while the ice machines were leased at no cost, the
leases required the dock owners to keep the machines insured. Graves said
the parish has written letters to both men to check on the insurance
proceeds, but got no response.

Graves believes the insurance was never purchased.

"We have not heard back from them." Graves said. "We believe they were not
insured and so, at this point, we've simply handed over the matter to our
legal department."

So now the parish government's forays into the ice business have left it
with no ice machines, no insurance proceeds, and a hulking ice plant slated
for demolition.

"If you take the icehouse project and the machines into account," Graves
said, "we're about $1 million into it and right now all we have is a vacant
piece of land with an old battered icehouse sitting on it."

Meanwhile, fishermen like F.J. Campo are left shaking their heads at the
missed opportunities.

"I guess it's what you would call a catastrophic screw-up on the parish's
part," Campo said. "We spent a lot of money and we got nothing for it.
Nothing."

But like the generations of resourceful bayou dwellers before him, Campo
said the fishermen will figure out a way to survive, whether from a killer
hurricane or the parish's fiasco in the ice business.