Ten projects on the Mississippi gulf coast are receiving a nearly $40 million boost from the state's settlement from the 2010 BP oil spill.
The projects include coast-wide marsh creation and restoration, along with additional funds for a "living shoreline" project in Hancock County. A connector road in Jackson County and rail line upgrades in Harrison County also received a boost.
There's also funding for seafood marketing, workforce training and tourism projects like the Mississippi Aquarium.
“The phrase I use all the time is that we not only want to put the coast back to where it was prior to the spill, but we want to make it better," says Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality executive director Gary Rikard. "And so that’s our main goal - to take in what the citizens see as needs, and to focus in on that. And to use this money - we obviously have a fiduciary obligation here - but not just to get us back to where we were, but to make us better.”
The state Department of Environmental Quality announced the details of the funding at its 2018 Mississippi Restoration Summit, held in Biloxi on Nov. 13.
Pearl River Community College received an additional $4 million, bringing its total RESTORE funding to $7 million, for a new workforce training center. Adam Breerwood, president of the community college, says the center will be centrally located near the Hancock County Port & Harbor Commission, the county's airport and the local high school. The center will help the community collect introduce several new programs, he says.
“We can really expand our CTE education, our workforce education," Breerwood says. "It will allow us to close the skills gap, which is very important right now in the state. Short-term training classes where people can pick up a skill and get right back into the workforce."
Mississippi is slated to receive a total of around $1.35 billion in settlement payments over 15 years. The funding announced this month brings the total so far to just over $500 million dollars.
