EPA awards $300,000 grant to improve Abita River water quality

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently awarded Louisiana's St. Tammany Parish $300,000 in funding via a cooperative agreement through its Gulf of Mexico Program, which will allow the parish to improve water quality in the Abita River watershed.

“We’re pleased to support this project in the Abita River watershed,” EPA Gulf of Mexico Program Director Ben Scaggs said. “Understanding environmental stressors is fundamental to protecting these critical resources that are so heavily relied on by the community.”

The parish has been working to improve water quality in the watershed for the past few years by bringing various community wastewater services into regional wastewater treatment facilities.

To serve areas where such solutions are not feasible, the parish is partnering with the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation (LPBF) to provide interim wastewater treatment solutions, which it will accomplish using the latest grant from the EPA.

“This collaborative endeavor between St. Tammany Parish Government Department of Environmental Services and the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation gives Parish government the opportunity to partner with the LPBF and double our resources and our expertise,” St. Tammany Parish President Pat Brister said. “This water quality initiative will have far-reaching positive impacts on public health and water resources that are able to be built upon as we move into the future. This will improve our quality of life, not only now, but into the foreseeable future.”