BATON ROUGE - The US Army Corps of Engineers has formally added hundreds of millions of dollars to the budget for a major Capital Area flood prevention project.

US Rep. Garret Graves said on Thursday that the Corps has fully funded the nearly $1 billion, decades-in-the-making Comite River Diversion Canal. The identification of $476 million to cover an anticipated shortfall comes two weeks after Graves said the Corps promised that the project would move forward as it finalized plans to pay for it.

“We’ve seen the cost of this project more than triple since we first ‘fully funded’ it in 2018,” Graves said. "These cost increases are unacceptable, but we can’t allow the Comite Project to stall again as it did for nearly four years before we revived it.

"My top priority is to get this project finished as quickly as possible. We have now secured nearly a billion dollars for this one linchpin flood protection project for the Capital Region.” 

Years of delays, compounded by inflation, have boosted the cost of the canal far beyond expectations.

Officials say the project is now on schedule for completion in 2025.

The funding gap threatened to stall progress on the project, which is one of the region's most important flood control efforts. Once open, the canal will reduce flooding in Zachary, Central and Watson, along with neighboring areas.

Graves said he hopes and expects that the cost won't escalate any further.

"It's certainly a huge concern, and one that I have gone over and over and over again with the leadership of the Corps of Engineers," he said. "When you say 970 (million dollars), is it going to be 970? And do you mean it this time?

"They'd given us the number preliminarily, but they did go through this extensive cost control board process, and they are telling us that this is the number."

The flood control system comprises a control structure at the Comite River, a control structure at Lilly Bayou, three control drop structures at the intersections of the diversion channel with White, Cypress and Baton Rouge Bayous, a drop control structure in the vicinity of McHugh Road, two railroad bridges, four highway bridges and one parish road bridge.

READ MORE ABOUT THE COMITE RIVER DIVERSION PROJECT