Zoning change slated for Oakville, a historic Black community

By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer

Residents of an historically Black community in Plaquemines Parish are once again fighting to rid their back yards of unwanted commercial development following a surprise notice on February 20 that a vacant lot in the Oakville subdivision of Belle Chasse is slated to be rezoned in a near-secret approval process.

“The property is adjacent to two cemeteries for slavery-descended persons,” says Rose Jackson, vice president of the Oakville Community Action Group. “There is also a playground nearby and we don’t want the property redeveloped because the plan is to use the land to build trailers for men from out of state here to work at a chemical facility. We don’t want our children around strangers with no ties to the area.”

Jackson’s community group has sparred with Plaquemines officials in the past, including a 2006 suit against the parish council to halt the expansion of a forty-foot trash pile, winning a partial shutdown of the waste dump in areas closest to the homes of Oakville residents. “I worked for 26 years to shut that landfill down,” says Jackson, whose group also works to thwart the growth of the area’s petrochemical industry.

Oakville residents learned of the land use proposal, which would re-designate property that is currently set aside for rural or agricultural purposes as real estate authorized for commercial use, after the parish’s planning and zoning department issued a public meeting notice in the local Plaquemines Gazette.

State law requires that “public bodies…give written public notice of any regular, special, or rescheduled meeting no later than twenty-four hours…before the meeting.” Yet Jackson says the late February notice in the Gazette announcing a March 5 hearing on the proposed zoning change is not adequate. “Nobody here subscribes to the Plaquemines Gazette,” Jackson says, referring to residents of Oakville. “Besides the paper is only available at two locations in Belle Chasse. Why put the notice in there?”

Jackson was notified, she says, by “someone familiar with the zoning change” after the notice was published. “I received a phone call and that is how I learned that they were planning to rezone this area.”

The meeting is also set to take place in Port Sulphur, nearly 40 miles away from the community that will be most affected by the zoning change. “I went to the parish offices and spoke to the head of the zoning department to ask that the meeting be postponed or that the location be changed to Belle Chasse,” says Jackson, adding, “but she did not acknowledge any of my requests,” referring to Ametra Rose, the parish official responsible for printing the meeting notice and chief of the planning and zoning unit.

“If I had to guess, I would say that the only reason for having the meeting in Port Sulphur would be because [at 6:00 p.m.] there is so much traffic in [Belle Chasse],” says Lacey Arb, an aide to parish councilman, Lloyd Newsom, whose district encompasses the Oakville community. “There is also a lot more space there to hold a meeting,” Arb says, referring to the site of the Port Sulphur YMCA on Civic Drive.

Rose did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Jackson, however, believes the Port Sulphur location is designed to dissuade the public from attending the meeting in person.

“We won’t be able to get the seniors there on such short notice,” says Jackson, “but we intend to show up and let it be known that we oppose the redevelopment of this vacant area.”

“I feel very good,” she adds, “about defeating this proposal.”

This article originally published in the March 7, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.