Timothy Kerner Jr. sits in his makeshift Jean Lafitte Town Hall office. His voice is hoarse, the words seeming to spill out faster than he can control them.
“Biden was sitting here just like me and you are.” Kerner recalled for a reporter, recounting the president’s September 2021 visit to the Jefferson Parish after Hurricane Ida. “He said, I’m committed to helping you.”
Kerner, 33, presides as mayor over Jean Lafitte. Three years after Ida, he is still bitter about being left off a federal aid supplement that helped coastal parishes recover from the storm. It’s the latest in a string of storm protection snubs for the town that nearly 1,800 residents call home on the fringes of Jefferson Parish, where brackish marsh meets cypress-filled swamps and docks crammed with commercial fishing boats.
During Ida, storm surge topped Jean Lafitte’s 7.5-foot protective “ring” levee. It left the town caked in mud. Most of the floodwater removal and muck clearing took place while waiting for federal and state officials to process paperwork to reimburse the town for its expenses, Kerner said.
“We came back with a vengeance. We cleaned up faster than everyone else,” he said. “I knew the community was at stake at that point.”
But nearly three years since the hurricane, the mayor’s office is still at the town’s recreation center as a replacement town hall has yet to be built. Down the street, storm-damaged Fisher Middle-High School remains closed, forcing some students to travel 40 minutes north to John Ehret High School in Marrero.
Kerner wants to demolish and then rebuild the school as a raised structure to prevent future flooding. Money for the $40 million to $65 million project has yet to receive federal government approval.
“Two and a half years and they keep asking for additional information about moving our football post back and forth,” Kerner said.
The rest of the town also waits. Raising homes at least 6 feet to escape future floods looms large for residents. The cost is out of reach for many in the blue-collar community, ranging from $180,000 to a quarter-million dollars per home. Qualifying for a government grant to elevate their house requires proof they were flooded three times before. Then comes the waitlist.
“Right now, we’re going on about two and a half years for many of our applicants.” said Maggie Talley, who directs the Office of Floodplain Management for Jefferson Parish. In total, Jefferson Parish has over 200 homes in the application process, she said, where requests for grants are processed by the state before undergoing review by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
It’s a predicament past generations never faced.
“Flooding here probably started 40 years ago,” Kerner said. “Before it never flooded in history. Now we’re flooding multiple times a year.”
Jean Lafitte Mayor Tim Kerner Jr. at the town’s annual seafood festival in April. (Aidan McCahill for Louisiana Illuminator)
When the federal government put billions into upgrading its flood risk reduction system after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Jean Lafitte was left on the outside to fend for itself. Kerner and his father Tim Sr., who preceded him as mayor, pleaded to no avail for money to raise the town’s ring levee to 10 feet.
Construction started last year on a $22.7 million storm surge protection system on the town’s southern end, but the upper half remains vulnerable. Kerner Jr. insists the West Closure Complex contributed to the town flooding during Ida. The $1 billion facility, known as “the world’s largest pumping station,” directs water from more populated areas of the Jefferson and Orleans west bank toward Lafitte.
Storm protection officials and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have said available data doesn’t back of Kerner’s claim.
Outside the federal hurricane protection system, Jean Lafitte faces a deluge of rising sea levels, strengthening storms and skyrocketing insurance prices. As the town struggles to literally stay above water, it has paid a hefty price. With $150 million from state funding invested in the construction of a new surge protection system to protect the town, many consider the effort expensive and futile.
For Jean Lafitte residents, the spending constitutes their fight for existence.
The town’s namesake comes from privateer Jean Lafitte, whose schooners homeported to the south in Barataria Bay. The Kerners, like many longtime Lafitte residents, proudly trace their origins to Manila Village, widely considered the first Asian settlement in the United States. It was home to Filipinos who established Louisiana’s once-thriving shrimp-drying industry.
Two centuries later, Cajun influence is much more prevalent, though people make ends meet in much the same way.
Benny Alexia started commercial shrimping when he was 16. More than four decades later he’s still casting nets in Barataria Bay, though the profession he once loved has dramatically changed. Jack crevalle, mackerel and sea turtles, once unheard-of catches in the bayou, are now commonplace in his nets.
“Somebody who hasn’t been out there just in the past three to five years would never recognize the place,” Alexia said. “When I built the boat that I have now, I actually wish I took my wife’s advice and went bigger.”
What used to be shields of barrier islands and coastline, protecting fishermen from Gulf of Mexico squalls, have deteriorated to open water. It’s forced Alexia to pack up and drive north during periods of high winds, seeking calmer inland waters.
During Ida, Alexia watched with his son from a neighbor’s house as his home in Lafitte, an unincorporated area 5 miles south of Jean Lafitte, was destroyed by 9 feet of floodwater.
“The right corner of it ended up actually at the edge of the street before it stopped,” he said. “There’s no other hurricane ever put 9 feet of water on a state highway 32 miles inland.”
Three years later, Alexia is still awaiting construction of his new home, funded partly with flood insurance money. He lives across the street in a government-provided camper, within sight of a bare foundation.
“We had trouble getting all the permits. We had trouble doing everything,” he said.
Alexia said he’s struggling to make ends meet after several years of cheaper, imported shrimp limiting what he can charge to wholesalers for his catch. Medium sized shrimp in Louisiana have gone from $3.81 per pound in 2015 to $2.43this year; in Barataria prices are known to dip as low as 60 cents.
“Financially, it drained me. It depleted everything I had,” he said.
Asked if he would ever leave his hometown, Alexia responded with a flat no. He’s known this bayou all his life, he said, and starting over in new territory would be out of the question. Plus, at his age, Alexia said it’s too late to change career paths.
Alexia said he plans to hand over his shrimping business to his son, on the condition he also attains an electrician’s license. “If things get bad enough, he can go get another job,” he said.
A majority of area residents harbor similar sentiments.
“I don’t want to leave at all,” Ian Terrio, 29, said, sitting on his porch.
For Terrio, Jean Lafitte’s tight-knit community keeps him tethered. It’s a place where he said people leave their doors unlocked, where a trip to the grocery store can feel like a high school reunion.
“It’s like you step back in time … you cross one bridge you into a completely different world,” he said.
Terrio grew up fishing and duck hunting. Now, it’s just fishing.
“There’s no more ducks,” he said, “There’s no more habitat.”
Homeowner’s insurance costs have more than doubled for Ian Terrio and his wife, Jena, since Hurricane Ida. He said it will be up to his two children to decide if they want to follow in his footsteps catching shrimp and crabs for a living. (Aidan McCahill for Louisiana Illuminator)
After high school, Terrio worked in the oil field before switching to crabbing and shrimp trawling in 2014.
“We all worry,” Terrio said, “You never know what’s gonna happen, but that’s fishing. That’s all part of the game.”
Terrio said he’s hopeful his kids will have the ability to follow in his footsteps if they choose.
“That’s up to them,” he said, “I can’t tell them a word.”
Terrio and his wife, Jena, are more anxious about rising homeowner’s insurance. The young couple has seen their annual premium more than double, from $2,360 to $6,100, since Ida.
For many, monthly insurance payments can cost more than their mortgage.
Then there are updated federal flood risk ratings that have caused premiums to soar for the National Flood Insurance Program, the government-backed coverage of last resort in flood-prone regions. In Jean Lafitte, the program is expected to raise rates from an average premium for a single family home of $947 to $2,764, an increase of 192% under the new formula, The Times-Picayune reported.
In 2019, residents of Isle de Jean Charles, an indigenous community in southern Terrebonne, were relocated to the northern part of the parish in the first state-sponsored climate resettlement program. An enclave of new homes near the Gray community were built with $48.3 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Though no similar plans are in place for Jean Lafitte — most residents would likely scoff at such a prospect — Mayor Kerner believes increased insurance prices are being used to push residents out. For a town whose residents earn a median income of $32,500, he says many people feel they have nowhere else to go.
“They’re trying to price these people out their homes,” Kerner said. “Many don’t have a savings account. Even if they made the conscious decision to move to higher ground and prevent flooding, move away from flooding, who’s gonna buy their home with this insurance crisis?”
So far residents are resilient, if not defiant. Since the most recent 2020 census, the population has only dropped by 2.43%. Still, outside the New Orleans hurricane protection levees, another storm like Ida may prove devastating.
Theophile Bourgeois IV, 41, inherited his charter fishing business after his father died in 2019. He sees his family business as a way to share Jean Lafitte’s culture with people from around the world.
On the dock behind him, his son cleaned redfish for a group of out-of-town anglers as a seaplane glided to a smooth landing on the nearby water. It was a picturesque spring day on the bayou and for Bourgeois, one that he feels justifies all the risks that accompany life in coastal Louisiana.
“We didn’t choose to build this place outside of levees, the levees were chosen to be built above us,” he said.
Though life on the edge tends to breed strong people, everyone has their breaking point.
Lately, Bourgeois said, the culture he loves to share is one increasingly “in peril.” He pointed to his lodge, a colonial structure now on stilts. He remembers coming back from college four times to help his dad with flood repairs. After Ida, he had to completely rebuild it on his own.
“How many times can you do that?” Bourgeois asked. “A lot of people didn’t come back after (Ida) because they’re tired of rebuilding.”
“But I can’t leave here, you know, this is my family.”
Tim Kerner Jr. is the scion of a family that, except for eight years in the 1950s, has held the town’s top office since 1888. Visitors from New Orleans speed down Leo E. Kerner Parkway to reach the town. The four-lane highway was named after the current mayor’s grandfather, who helped incorporate Jean Lafitte in 1974 before becoming its first official mayor.
In 2020, Tim Kerner Sr. passed the torch to his son after being elected state representative.
Kerner Sr. tapped federal funding to build Jean Lafitte’s 7.5-foot levee system starting in 2003. However, after Hurricane Katrina exposed engineering failures in the New Orleans flood protection system in 2005, Congress raised the standards to receive federal levee funding.
When the Army Corps of Engineers embarked on a $12 billion project to safeguard New Orleans from a 100-year storm (one with a 1% chance of occurring in any given year), Lafitte’s levees designed to protect against less severe tidal surges were no longer eligible for funding.
“When the federal government came and gifted everyone a levee and just left us out, we didn’t have a tax base to build up a quarter of it,” Kerner Jr. said.
Instead, Kerner Sr. decided to invest millions in public resources, including a 1,300-seat auditorium, a library, a wetlands museum, a civic center and a baseball park. By building attractions, his goal was to increase the cost-benefit ratio of building storm protection for an area of fewer than 7,000 people. Simply put, the town would become too valuable not to protect.
Perhaps his biggest success was the creation of a Lafitte Area Independent Levee District, which lobbies the state and Jefferson Parish for money to build levees.
“Him doing that, it went from ‘We’ll send you sand and shovels’ to … two decades later to being $150 million worth of levees,” Kerner Jr. said.
One of its creations is the Fisher School basin project, 3 miles of steel sheet-piling flood walls, earthen levees and floodgates completed in 2020. The $30 million project raised protection for about 450 acres in Lafite to 7.5 feet, though it wasn’t enough to protect the town and its surrounding areas from Hurricane Ida.
Like his father and grandfather, Kerner Jr. is known for an almost fanatical responsibility to save the people of his hometown and its surrounding unincorporated communities from succumbing to the Gulf.
“Them people fight and fight and fight to try and help us just as much as they do for their own town,” Alexia said.
Fisher Middle-High School remains largely untouched since Hurricane Ida in August 2021. Students from Jean Lafitte have to attend classes nearly 30 minutes away in Marrero. Construction on a new school has not begun. (Aidan McCahill for Louisiana Illuminator)
Much of Kerner Jr.’s job revolves around pressing state and Jefferson Parish officials for funds to keep building their levee system. Being the head of the Levee Authority has helped. In March 2023, the Rosethorne Basin project began adding 10,300 feet of floodwalls and floodgates at a 7.5-foot elevation. It’s projected to cost $34 million.
In September 2023, a $14 million project was set in motion to tack on another 3 miles of levee protection, both designed to prevent flooding from a 10-year storm, one that has a 10% chance of occurring in any given year but not one as strong as Ida.
“I don’t think it’s enough, but I think it’s an incredible start,” Kerner Jr. said.
Despite his success scrounging for funds, Kerner Jr. can’t quell the feeling of being left behind by the federal government.
“If you don’t start to invest in protecting these people, and you don’t give them that aid, then when storms hit the response is going to be astronomically more over the years.”
As he sat in his rec center office, the mayor became most passionate when discussing his alma mater, Fisher Middle-High. As a rare A-rated public school in Louisiana, he views it as the heartbeat of the community, where young families might see free quality education as a valid tradeoff for paying exorbitant insurance premiums.
If the ongoing wait for federal government approval to rebuild his school — and, more broadly, federal funding to protect Jean Lafitte — is a source of pain to the mayor, seeing students bussed to school out-of-town twists the knife toward agony.
“It’s just so disheartening and so frustrating and shows the country’s flaws whenever you see so much federal aid going to foreign countries,” Kerner Jr. said, “We’re putting these kids in an environment where it’s very, very hard to succeed … it’s killing this community.”
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. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on Facebook and X.