In less than two weeks, the new Trump administration reversed a two-year-long effort to preserve centuries of history along an 11-mile stretch of St. John the Baptist Parish’s west bank — the longest sweep of unindustrialized land in Louisiana’s chemical corridor.
Back in October, the Department of the Interior published a study that found the region could be eligible for the country’s most prestigious historic designation: a National Historic Landmark. But last week, the agency reversed its decision.
State, parish and port officials applauded the move, calling it a win for economic development and state rights. Like the Trump administration, the Landry administration feared that the use of laws aimed to protect historical communities would chill any future industrial developers looking to propose projects not only in St. John but across the River Parishes.
“ This removes undue federal overreach, and thus enables the River Parishes to again attract business, development and generally improve the lives of this area,” said Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Aurelia Skipwith Giacometto.
But local and historic preservation advocates who helped propel the effort said this excitement could be overblown. Under current law, future industrial proposals would likely need to undergo the same scrutiny again.
“Any project that would move forward would still have to be looked at in the same way under the same rules,” said Brian Davis, the executive director of the Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation.
The Interior Department revoked its decision on eligibility after the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality asked the agency to reconsider it. The request came just over a week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, long after the comment period on the determination had closed.
Last year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asked the National Park Service, which is an agency within the Interior Department, to determine whether St. John’s west bank could qualify as a National Historic Landmark. The Corps was trying to decide if permitting a grain elevator proposed in the area would violate the National Historic Preservation Act.
But a few months before the Park Service issued its final determination in October, the grain elevator’s developers backed out of the project. Despite the project’s cancelation, the Corps asked the Park Service to continue its assessment to help inform any future permit applications in the area.
The Park Service ultimately found that the significance of the area’s history made it a strong candidate for landmark status. The area offers an almost untouched window into the bygone eras of European settlement, slavery and Reconstruction, as well as the sugar industry’s history.
But in a Feb. 13 letter to the Corps, the Park Service official in charge of historic designations, Joy Beasley, said that because the project had already been canceled, there was no proposed threat to any historic properties. The agency’s determination of eligibility for the region was therefore “premature and untimely,” according to Beasley. Without a threat, Beasley said it was unclear whether the agency still had jurisdiction to issue the decision.
Advocates who led the push against the grain elevator said they were caught off guard by the agency’s decision. Joy and Jo Banner lead a local nonprofit called the Descendants Project, which aims to uplift communities descended from enslaved people. The pair grew up within a few hundred feet of where the grain elevator was proposed, and they worried about the disruption to the land, air pollution and increased traffic.
Their fight merged the issues of historic preservation and environmental justice, by using the protections under the National Historic Preservation Act and several lawsuits to combat the project.
During a press conference, the sisters pledged to continue their work but said they were disappointed to see more of their tools for preservation stripped away. Last year, the parish council also stopped requiring industrial facilities to maintain a 2,000-foot buffer from residences.
“ We don't have that safety net anymore. They just said it. They literally just said your safety net is gone,” said Jo Banner.
Alongside the Banners, preservation groups like the Louisiana Trust and the National Trust for Historic Preservation said they are reviewing their legal options. In 2023, the National Trust named St. John’s west bank to its list of Most Endangered Historic Places.
The Interior Department’s decision comes after a federal judge ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency couldn’t investigate civil rights violations in Louisiana. Under the Landry administration, LDEQ Secretary Giacometto has pledged to balance its mission to protect public health and the environment “equally” with business development.
Since entering office, the Trump administration has also shuttered offices related to environmental justice, reversed former President Joe Biden’s mandate to ensure infrastructure and environment spending reaches low-income and minority communities and paused funding for infrastructure and environmental projects already awarded under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.
