BATON ROUGE — The review process for another Mississippi River bridge connecting La. 1 in Plaquemine to La. 30 in Iberville Parish has been delayed.

At a Capital Area Road Bridge District meeting on Monday, leaders of the bridge project said a review under the National Environmental Policy Act will start later this year. It was originally set for July 11.

In total, the project is estimated to cost $2 billion, with just under $400 million currently accounted for, according to DOTD's Assistant Administrator of Critical Projects, Christina Brignac. In April, the project was estimated to be finished by 2033, but that date could be up in the air with the NEPA delay.

Brignac added that the delay in the NEPA review start time is because they are still reviewing studies analyzing the site, as well as addressing ongoing concerns about residential and environmental impacts in Iberville Parish.

"There's still a lot of questions," Brignac said. "There are impacts, so showing these impacts to a lot of these neighborhoods, the control of access, how we're impacting access. So we have to get back together and have several more meetings to determine how we're going to mitigate those impacts."

She said these are things DOTD and consulting firm Atlas are going to need to know before they bring their final plans to the public at meetings in the third and fourth quarters of the year. Public hearings would then be held in summer 2026, an anticipated schedule presented at the Capital Area Road and Bridge District meeting showed. 

Once NEPA begins its review, the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development will have 12 months to prepare an environmental assessment of the project, Brignac said.

She said that if they did initiate the NEPA review at the scheduled time, it would "really be setting us up for failure."

Headway is being made on the project, she noted. Fieldwork and a final analysis of the geographic conditions on the project are both complete, with other key steps in the development of the project either complete or underway, Brignac said.

Despite this, members of the Capital Area Road and Bridge District expressed frustrations that the project is facing further delays.

"All this sounds like to me is continued delay, continued delay, continued delay stopping this project from moving forward," Iberville Parish President Chris Daigle said, concerned that the issues Brignac presented have been known about for two years. "When I first came on last year, we were almost supposed to be at the completed end of NEPA now."

Daigle says that he feels like the delayed tasks and the mitigation of impacts on La. 1 and La. 30 should have been done by now.

"I just don't see how we're not at that point where we know what those tie-ins are going to be," he said. "It's just always something delaying the project."