www.thecentersquare.com – By Nolan McKendry | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-05-01 15:49:00
(The Center Square) − Amid growing concerns nationwide over seafood fraud, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival has emerged as a rare bright spot in the murky world of shrimp sourcing.
A new round of genetic testing found that nearly every shrimp dish sold at this year’s Jazz Fest was made with genuine U.S. wild-caught shrimp from the Gulf — a striking contrast to most restaurants across the South.
The study, conducted by SeaD Consulting using its RIGHTTest genetic analysis tool, examined 19 shrimp-based dishes from vendors at the 2025 festival.
Of those, 18 were verified to contain authentic Gulf shrimp. Only one dish, from a vendor whose other offerings passed the test, was found to use imported shrimp. The test was funded by the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a national advocacy group for domestic shrimpers.
“This is a huge moment of pride for New Orleans,” said Dave Williams, founder of SeaD Consulting. “We found vendors doing the right thing — not because they had to, but because it matters to them, to the community, and to the culture of this city.”
Unlike restaurants, temporary food vendors in Louisiana are not legally required to disclose whether their shrimp is imported or farm-raised. That makes the Jazz Fest findings even more remarkable: Vendors chose to support the local industry on their own.
The result is a resounding show of solidarity with Louisiana shrimpers, who face steep competition from cheaper imported shrimp, often farmed under questionable labor and environmental conditions.
The vendors found serving wild-caught Gulf shrimp span every corner of the festival grounds — from shrimp bread and gumbo in Food Area One, to Vietnamese shrimp skewers in Heritage Square and shrimp ceviche tostadas in the Cultural Exchange Village.
The timing couldn’t be better for Louisiana’s seafood industry. The inshore shrimping season is about to begin, and the industry is fighting an uphill battle. In other parts of the country, seafood fraud is rampant.
Just weeks before the Jazz Fest, SeaD Consulting conducted similar tests at 44 randomly selected restaurants in Wilmington, North Carolina—a coastal city celebrated for its seafood scene.
There, 34 restaurants (77%) were found to be serving imported, farm-raised shrimp, even as menus and servers suggested it was fresh and local. Only 10 establishments passed the authenticity test.
“In Wilmington, the seafood fraud rate is staggeringly high,” said John Williams, executive director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance. “Restaurants are misleading customers, hurting the local economy, and undermining the hard work of American shrimpers.”
The SSA has been funding shrimp testing across seven Gulf and Southeastern states as part of a broader campaign for transparency. Preliminary findings show that seafood mislabeling occurs in 78% of cases in states without seafood origin labeling laws. Even in states with such laws, fraud rates remain troubling at 36%.
The contrast between New Orleans and Wilmington underscores how cultural institutions like Jazz Fest can drive change. By voluntarily choosing Gulf shrimp, Jazz Fest vendors have shown that integrity and local pride can guide sourcing decisions—even in the absence of regulation.
“There’s no shame in selling imported shrimp,” said Dave Williams. “But there’s a big problem when you pretend it’s local. Let consumers decide—with the truth.”
The Southern Shrimp Alliance says it hopes other events and restaurants will follow Jazz Fest’s example. Until then, diners are encouraged to ask questions, request sourcing details, and support establishments that prioritize transparency and local suppliers.
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Centrist
The article does not present a clear ideological stance but instead reports on factual findings related to seafood sourcing and shrimp authenticity. The tone is neutral, focusing on the results of genetic testing conducted at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and comparing it with practices in Wilmington, North Carolina. The article highlights the positive example set by Jazz Fest in supporting local shrimpers, without vilifying imported shrimp outright. The content primarily provides information on seafood fraud and the efforts of advocacy groups like the Southern Shrimp Alliance, without taking a partisan position. The focus is on transparency and consumer choice, which reflects a centrist approach.
SUMMARY: The Alzheimer’s Association recently highlighted Louisiana’s 2025 Dementia Care Specialist Program, aiding caregivers with support groups, resources, and memory screenings. Alzheimer’s poses a $1 billion Medicaid burden, making advocacy crucial. Advocate Bonnie Farmer Haye, who has shared her emotional story with U.S. legislators, underscores the importance of funding. The annual Walk to End Alzheimer’s in Monroe, featuring a Promise Garden ceremony, raises funds for local advocacy, education, and support groups. Proceeds support ongoing Louisiana research projects in Shreveport, Lafayette, and New Orleans, aiming to expand efforts statewide. To join, visit www.alz.org/liana.
SUMMARY: Robert Gautreaux, former Lafayette Parish School System construction director, was arrested on felony charges of filing false public records and injuring public records related to alleged forgery of contractor quotes for school projects. Gautreaux reportedly altered vendor documents to meet bid requirements for projects valued between $50,000 and $249,999 and attempted to cover up his actions. Despite awareness of the investigation, Superintendent Francis Touchet reassigned Gautreaux to a teaching role. Investigations revealed forged quotes involving multiple contractors, including a company hired without a license. Gautreaux faces up to five years in prison per count and fines; the probe remains ongoing.
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city’s recovery reveals resilience fatigue amid stalled progress. The Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, completed in 2009, symbolizes protection and mourning for lives lost. Despite billions in federal aid, infrastructure upgrades lag, with projects like the Mirabeau Water Gardens only partially completed. Coastal restoration efforts, including the shelved Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, face political and financial hurdles. Experts stress the need to shift from reactive disaster funding to proactive investment in resilient infrastructure and ecosystems. Residents seek relief from repeated recovery burdens, advocating for infrastructure that withstands climate change without relying solely on human resilience.
An American flag has been strategically placed on one of the massive beams supporting the Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, part of the New Orleans region hurricane and storm damage risk reduction system.
Completed in 2009 to close off the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the barrier is designed to decrease damage to the metropolitan area when a major hurricane pushes water from the Gulf of Mexico into the lakes that surround the city and neighboring parishes.
The flag on the wall symbolizes pride and mourning, a reminder of the people it protects and a memorial for those who died 20 years ago when Hurricane Katrina hit. The failure of the federal levee system Aug. 29, 2005, claimed more than a thousand lives, displaced nearly a million people in the region and left permanent scars on New Orleans.
A go-to term emerged to praise New Orleanians and their neighbors who persevered through the catastrophe and took part in the unprecedented rebuilding: resilient. But as various recovery programs faltered and efforts to ensure disaster history would not repeat itself stalled, “resilient” or “resiliency” now elicit bitter feelings among locals.
“I think people have gotten tired of the word. Not just because it’s become cliché, but because people have begun to understand it as an excuse for lack of preparation or execution, lack of planning or execution,” said Michael Hecht, CEO and president of Greater New Orleans Inc., a regional economic development group.
Hecht came to Louisiana in 2006 from New York, where he led a 9/11 small business recovery program for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. After directing the state’s post-Katrina business recovery efforts, he was chosen to lead GNO Inc. in 2008.
“We had been knocked down by an unprecedented event,” Hecht said. “It was either be resilient or die, so we were resilient.”
The world has watched as New Orleans fundamentally changed, having lost a significant portion of its Black working class and attracting an upsurge in mostly white transplants from out of state. With more than 484,000 residents before Katrina, the city’s population plummeted below 344,000 in the 2010 census. The number climbed above 391,000 in 2020 and has since fallen about 4% as of 2024, according to various estimates.
Most who have stayed are ardent defenders of the city’s culture, of which resiliency fatigue is quickly becoming a feature. It’s reflected in Louisiana’s slow progress to rebuild coastal land and improve the adaptability of cities to match what post-Katrina boosters envisioned.
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Restoration resistance
After Katrina, more emphasis was placed on rebuilding Louisiana’s vanishing coastal wetlands to protect residents from the increasing threat of hurricanes. A state Coastal Master Plan has taken shape over the past two decades, gaining official approval in 2023, to tie together restoration efforts and shield wetlands from sea level rise, subsidence and worsening hurricanes.
“We learned from Hurricane Katrina that levees alone aren’t enough,” said Alisha Renfro, a coastal scientist with National Wildlife Foundation. “We also need a healthy natural ecosystem sitting out in front of those levees to protect the structures that protect our communities.”
But the master plan encountered a huge setback in July with the end of what had been its keystone project, the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project. Gov. Jeff Landry led pushback against the project for its feared impact on fisheries and nearly $3 billion price tag.
So far, the state’s Coastal Restoration and Protection Authority has spent $600 million to harness the power of the Mississippi River to bring fresh water and sediment to wetlands in the Barataria Basin – only to shelve the diversion.
“It was probably one of the most innovative, forward-thinking things in terms of being a resilience hub for the world,” said Amanda Moore, senior director for the National Wildlife Federation’s Gulf program.
A lifetime Gulf Coast resident, Moore moved to New Orleans from the Tampa, Florida, area in 2009 to take a job as a community organizer with the National Wildlife Federation. She joined the wave of thinkers, scientists and planners who came to the city after Katrina with the hope of bringing relief from the constant threat of flood.
“For people who live on the Gulf Coast – and especially South Louisiana – it’s exhausting,” she said.
The federation was among the voices that influenced upgrades to the region’s storm risk reduction system in the years after Katrina. Moore led efforts such as the MRGO Must Go Coalition, advocating for reversal of wetlands damage attributed to saltwater intrusion from the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet.
“You’re helping to alleviate maybe some of that exhaustion that people are personally feeling when you do the coastal restoration,” Moore said. “You’re adding this layer of protection, you’re helping it create a healthier environment that’s safer, so that does help people really be more resilient and not burnt out.”
Funding momentum peters out
As Katrina and its aftermath garnered worldwide attention, the recovery money streamed in from Washington and charitable foundations. The federal government directed $76 billion to Louisiana projects.
But keeping up the pace of investment after post-disaster attention spans waned became a problem for state and local leaders. Even with billions of dollars put into infrastructure, billions more would be needed for upkeep and replacing outdated systems. Stormwater drainage and drinking water in New Orleans, for example, rely on a power supply and mains that, in many spots, are more than a century old.
Charles Allen, Gulf Coast community engagement director for the National Audubon Society, recalls the vast amounts of federal and philanthropic dollars directed to the region in the years immediately after Katrina – and the dropoff that followed. It revealed the inability of state and local governments to sustain the level of rebuilding needed.
“It’s like anything in life, you know?” Allen said. “We gotta maintain our bodies, and we have to invest in whatever it takes to do that.”
The 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon just off the Southeast Louisiana coast reopened wounds in the region that had yet to heal from Katrina’s trauma. Like the levee failures after the hurricane, It was considered another manmade, preventable disaster. Eleven crew members were killed, and the catastrophic oil spill tainted wildlife and habitat in all five Gulf Coast states. Livelihoods that depended on the Gulf were sidetracked for months, if not ended entirely.
Petroleum giant BP, which contracted the drillship, reached a $20 billion settlement with the federal government and impacted states. In Louisiana, it provided the long-sought financial foundation for its coastal master plan.
But with the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion shelved – and seemingly no other major restoration projects in the queue – Allen and others with vested interest in coastal flood protection fear Louisiana has become dependent on disaster recovery funding to pay for critical infrastructure that should already be in place.
“Let’s not wait for another storm because then it’s always too late when that happens,” Allen said “You gotta invest in it, you gotta support it, you’ve got to fund it.”
“It’s a lot of reactive disaster-related funding that’s allowing Louisiana to do this work,” Moore said. “We’ve got to figure out how to get out of that cycle.”
The Lake Borgne Surge Barrier is part of the New Orleans region’s hurricane and storm damage risk reduction system. (Elise Plunk/Louisiana Illuminator)
‘People can just be people’
Katrina recovery funds paid for upgrades to the massive pumping stations at the end of New Orleans’ outfall drainage canals that pump stormwater into Lake Pontchartrain. Beyond that, however, the city hasn’t engineered a way to handle street flooding from routine heavy rainstorms.
One project was held up as a way for New Orleans to adapt to the regular influx of rainwater, rather than fruitlessly attempt to pump it away. The Gentilly Resilience District called for turning neutral grounds in the neighborhood into retention areas. Residents would be encouraged to add features such as rain cisterns and permeable driveways, with grants to cover their cost.
The centerpiece of the district was the Mirabeau Water Garden, planned for 25 acres of land that were once home to a Catholic convent. The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph donated the land to the city in 2015 on the condition it be used to enhance and protect the neighborhood. It was designed to divert and hold up to 10 million gallons of stormwater in ponds and constructed wetlands, with a pedestrian path and other amenities to invite the public into the space.
The architecture firm Waggonner and Ball designed the water garden using best practices for how to integrate water into a coastal urban setting. The idea came out of a trans-Atlantic collaboration after Katrina called the Dutch Dialogues, in which New Orleans experts tapped into the Netherlands’ experience living with water.
The federal government provided $141 million to the city in 2017 to bring the Gentilly Resilience District to life, with a completion date set for September 2022. But as of 2023, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development noted that only 15% of the money had been spent. The water garden remains largely unfinished.
HUD’s inspector general designated the city a “slow spender” in a project audit, noting that its elements “did not always improve the program participants’ ability to withstand future extreme events.”
Work continues on the early stages of the Mirabeau Water Gardens, a stormwater retention project planned for the Gentilly neighborhood. (Photo by Greg LaRose/Louisiana Illuminator)
In addition to his role with GNO Inc., Hecht was named chairman of the governor’s committee to prepare New Orleans for the 2025 Super Bowl, played in February at the Superdome. Part of Hecht’s charge was to track progress on city infrastructure projects. And while the Gentilly Resilience District is well outside the city’s tourist zone, its lack of progress was noticeable.
“It’s happening. It’s been accepted as a concept, but it’s been extremely slow,” Hecht said. “And that’s just been execution failure, oftentimes on the part of the city.”
The communications team for the city of New Orleans did not respond to a request for comment on the timeline of finishing the Mirabeau Water Gardens.
The Mirabeau Water Garden’s status is considered by residents to be symbolic of New Orleans falling well short of the post-Katrina vision that boasted resilience as a key component of its new economy. Much like the Netherlands, it was thought that the Crescent City could become a beacon of expertise for how to adapt to climate change.
“We thought we were going to be able to really build a sector around selling our experience post Katrina with water management and environmental management around the world,” Hecht said. “If we’re being honest, it has not materialized much as part of our economy.”
It has happened in a small way, he said, citing the Water Institute in Baton Rouge. The independent research center focuses on the Mississippi River Delta and Gulf Coast, and it has applied its expertise to several projects in the region.
“But I think there’s still a lot more,” Hecht said.
Allen believes the opportunity to make Louisiana that hub of water management and resilience still exists, but he acknowledged it is still far from materializing 20 years after Katrina.
“This story of restoration, it’ll never end, which is a good thing,” Allen said. “This kind of work fuels jobs, environmental research and teaching.”
Until or unless that sector develops, the vulnerability of southeast Louisiana to future disasters will continue to place a strain on its residents, observers say, and climate change only heightens that risk.
“That is the goal … building structures, either literally or metaphorically, strong enough so that in a world with climate change and weather volatility, when things happen, either natural or man made, we don’t have to be resilient,” Hecht said.
Renfro, the coastal scientist with the National Wildlife Federation, said it’s wrong to keep placing the same burden of recovery on a population forced to accept conditions beyond their control.
“Asking the same people again and again to be resilient … it feels unfair,” she said. “People can just be people, and infrastructure can be resilient.”
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Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
This content primarily focuses on the environmental, social, and governmental challenges faced by New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. It highlights the shortcomings of government and infrastructure in adequately preparing for and responding to disasters, emphasizes the need for investment in sustainable and natural coastal restoration efforts, and discusses social issues like demographic changes and economic recovery. The article critiques political and administrative decisions, such as the shelving of major restoration projects and slow spending of federal funds, from an angle that favors proactive climate resilience, environmental protection, and equitable recovery efforts—stances typically associated with center-left perspectives. However, it avoids overt partisanship or ideological rhetoric, maintaining a fact-based and nuanced approach.
