Makaelyn Lavigne doesn’t wish to depart.

From her small hometown of Modeste, in Ascension Parish, Lavigne, 20, commutes each week to undergraduate lessons in New Orleans. She’d a lot slightly drive over an hour to highschool than transfer away from the beloved, predominantly Black neighborhood the place her household has lived for many years. 

She is the fifth era of her household to stay on this white clapboard home in Modeste going through the grassy Mississippi River levee. She sleeps in the identical room her grandfather grew up in, shaded by sprawling oak timber, and spends her spare time rescuing canine together with her mother. Her grandmother is famous environmental justice advocate Sharon Lavigne. 

“We maintain one another down right here,” Makaelyn Lavigne mentioned on a current afternoon, as she sat on a bench on the Modeste playground, sugar cane fields stretching away behind her. Her recollections are of a neighborhood constructed round households and nature: “My grandpa dug a pond for us after we have been youthful so we may fish. We go monitoring bobcats within the woods. They’ve eagles that nest throughout the river.”

At present, eagles above Modeste fly by means of among the nation’s most polluted air. Unprecedented petrochemical buildouts have modified Lavigne’s paradise. Her grandmother, Sharon Lavigne, a retired schoolteacher, has garnered worldwide consideration together with her ongoing battles towards corporations like Formosa and CF Industries. However the Lavigne household – and a whole bunch of others in Modeste – might quickly be compelled to go away their properties as petrochemical corporations push to construct an enormous multi-corporation chemical industrial park that would flip Ascension into “Ammonia Parish.”

The focused stretch of land abuts neighborhoods and houses just like the Lavigne’s. To clear the way in which for the challenge, referred to as the RiverPlex MegaPark, corporations eyeing the event have begun to rent actual property corporations. The corporations have already made buyout provides to some residents, together with Ashley Gaignard, a resident of Ascension Parish and campaigner with Rural Roots, who described them as low-ball provides.

However in October, Gaignard discovered a option to throw up some roadblocks within the march in direction of industrial improvement. Rural Roots is among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit – impressed by a Caddo Parish lawsuit by Lawyer Basic Liz Murrill herself. It challenges whether or not a parish council’s votes are authorized if members don’t vocally vote aloud.

Gaignard is attempting to dam the rezoning that allowed this large industrial growth in Ascension Parish. However 4 corporations have already drawn up proposals for the Modeste buyout, whereas street crews are creating entry roads for some amenities that start building subsequent yr. In addition to Gaignard and her lawsuit, the one factor standing in the way in which of the MegaPark now are locals: residents right here personal among the land surrounding the large-scale improvement.

If the widespread buyout strikes ahead as deliberate, it stands to vary life right here endlessly: it may primarily destroy Modeste and a part of close by Donaldsonville, displacing as much as 800 residents. “It’s simply very disheartening to see how they’re so keen to displace a complete neighborhood,” Lavigne mentioned.

Ascension Parish Council didn’t reply to emailed questions concerning the buyout plan.

Residents are left confronted with an not possible selection: those that refuse the buyout could possibly be surrounded by trade belching dangerous ammonia.

Ascension ranks excessive within the nation for air air pollution
Ascension Parish sits in “Most cancers Alley,” the 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that’s dwelling to a excessive focus of petrochemical websites and carcinogenic air pollution. The parish is among the many high 10 counties within the nation for air air pollution: the CF Industries plant in Donaldsonville is the nation’s single largest poisonous air polluter by pound, averaging greater than a dozen unauthorized discharges per yr.

Simply upriver from Donaldsonville sits Modeste: a small however traditionally necessary unincorporated neighborhood, surrounded by sugarcane fields and agricultural land. 

Centuries in the past, the neighborhood was dwelling to the plantation Babin Place, which in 1911 was bought by a Black benevolent society that renamed it New Africa Farm. The society opened rural faculties for youngsters round Modeste. Later nonetheless, the farm was the house of Leonard Julien Sr., the Black inventor of the sugarcane-planting machine. 

Now, mentioned Lavigne, the city of Modeste is dwelling to many grandparents, principally Black and working-class folks. As with many rural areas throughout the nation, younger folks usually depart city within the face of dwindling job alternatives, abandoning villages which might be principally made up of elders, who yearn for an area job market that would as soon as once more maintain their youngsters and grandkids, as an alternative of the depressed agricultural financial system.

These realities could make it powerful for locations like Ascension Parish to fend off trade – even when it comes with waves of latest air pollution, potential leaks, and explosions.

Modeste faces its personal hurdles. As an integrated neighborhood, its voters didn’t get a say within the election of Donaldsonville Mayor Leroy Sullivan, one of many key boosters of the brand new industrial park. 

Like the complete Ascension Parish Council, Sullivan helps the brand new improvement. The promised financial growth is the draw for him, although he’s clearly conscious of the risks, as a survivor of a 2000 explosion on the Donaldsonville CF Industries plant that killed a contractor. Burned throughout most of his physique, Sullivan spent 37 days recovering in a burn unit. His arms, Lavigne mentioned, nonetheless bear the scars.

Gaignard doesn’t perceive how any Ascension Parish leaders entrusted to guard their residents can open the door for the commercial park. “The identical folks that you simply went knocking on their door for a vote, these are the identical folks now saying, ‘You bought to maneuver. You need to go. We don’t have a spot so that you can go. All we all know is it is advisable go,’” she mentioned. 

Ascension Parish plans to construct the sprawling RiverPlex MegaPark industrial growth throughout 17,000 acres. When accomplished, Modeste will likely be surrounded by heavy trade.  Ammonia manufacturing within the space may greater than quadruple.

Finally, it’s a selection between leaving a cherished neighborhood and residing subsequent to what could possibly be Most cancers Alley’s densest supply of air pollution but. “They’re telling folks it’s a selection, proper? ‘If you wish to go,’” Gaignard mentioned. “However everyone knows it’s not protected to stay that shut to 3 industries being proper on the subsequent aspect of your fence.”

Past the present CF Industries amenities, the proposed park would add an ammonia plant from Clear Hydrogen Works, a Hyundai metal plant, a “blue” ammonia plant from CF Industries and a number of Japanese corporations. The time period “blue” ammonia is the time period used for ammonia produced utilizing “carbon seize,” a disputed know-how that purports to seize carbon from smokestacks. Although it’s positioned as a option to reduce carbon air pollution, by both storing it underground or utilizing it to supply extra oil, many environmental advocates warn that it solely offers cowl for polluters.

Ascension Parish and the state of Louisiana are serving to to fund the park and associated street and rail expansions utilizing a $600 million taxpayer-funded incentive bundle.

Laying the groundwork for Modeste’s buyout

In Could, the Ascension Parish Council authorized a decision to start exploring a buyout for greater than 200 residents. In August, the Council put out a name for corporations to develop a Relocation and Buyout Plan.

4 corporations submitted bids in response, vying to steer Ascension Parish’s buyout. As of November, not one of the corporations had been awarded a contract, however The Lens obtained their purposes by means of public document requests.

All 4 corporations have Louisiana ties. One agency, Grant Administration Group, is partnering with Middleberg Riddle Group, who rely New Orleans Metropolis Councilmember JP Morrell as counsel. One other, Ahearn-Alecha Structure, is led by Matthew Ahearn, founding father of New Orleans’ Irish Cultural Museum; their charges for the proposed work are as much as $250 per hour.

The opposite two corporations – Timbalier Assets and Want Line – record companions who rely earlier work on the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles as amongst their {qualifications}. 

“Our crew members developed a deep understanding of the sensitivities inherent in requesting households to switch possession of property held for generations,” Want Line wrote of the Isle de Jean Charles challenge.

That resettlement has been critiqued for the tribe’s lack of self-determination, cultural displacement, and substandard housing on the new website.

To finish the buyouts extra rapidly, among the MegaPark corporations have employed actual property corporations immediately, who’re already making insultingly low provides to residents, Gaignard mentioned.

“They’re giving buyouts, however the buyouts are actually not definitely worth the property,” she mentioned. “I’ve one gentleman that has their home on an acre of land, and so they have been providing $150,000. They usually’re of their 80s, and so they’re like: ‘The place can we go and purchase a home [for that low a sum?]”

The supply is lower than half the median sale value of a house in Ascension Parish, in accordance with realty web site Redfin.

Gaignard mentioned she’s significantly involved for susceptible elders in her neighborhood, who would battle if relocated.

Difficult the rezoning

The primary steps in direction of the commercial park’s improvement got here in 2015, when the Ascension Parish Council adopted an ordinance creating the 17,000-acre West Financial institution Industrial Overlay District. The ordinance made it a lot simpler to rezone land round Modeste from “conservation” to “industrial.”

Builders have been treating that industrial zoning as a given. Even because the rezoning course of is challenged, the Ascension Financial Improvement Corp. advertises the commercial way forward for the RiverPlex MegaPark.

In August 2025, the Ascension Parish Council voted twice in two weeks to rezone parcels of land for the MegaPark. On August 7, by approving two agenda objects, the Council gave industrial zoning to greater than 3,400 acres of conservation land within the space deliberate for the RiverPlex MegaPark.

However the course of was questionable, the Rural Roots swimsuit alleges. 

When listening to the agenda merchandise, the chair of the council, Chase Melancon, didn’t obtain an audible “yea” vote from each councilmember. As an alternative, Melancon requested aloud: “Any questions? Any objections? Listening to none, so moved,” after which gaveled the vote by means of, after ready lower than a second.

Melancon adopted the identical course of on August 21, 2025, when the Council rezoned over 900 acres of land expressly for CF Industries Blue Level LLC, the deliberate carbon seize facility.

Altogether, the Rural Roots lawsuit challenges the rezoning of a couple of quarter of the land meant for the MegaPark.

Low-ball buyout provides

Jack Inexperienced, a marketing campaign supervisor with Rise St. James, first realized concerning the Ascension Parish buyout as a result of Modeste residents have been so upset that they drove to St. James on the lookout for assist from Rise St. James’ founder, Sharon Lavigne.

Inexperienced believes builders are intentionally “constructing a bunch of commercial entry roads proper now and utilizing eminent area to chop up the present housing there.” He thinks it will make it simpler for builders to “intimidate the residents into accepting a buyout they don’t wish to settle for.” 

The entry roads dividing the neighborhood, as described by Inexperienced, are seemingly in service of the Hyundai Motor Group’s $5.8 billion metal plant, which is able to start building in 2026. Earlier this yr, Hyundai executives raised considerations with Louisiana Financial Improvement concerning the firm’s want for expanded and accelerated street building in Ascension Parish. The state responded that it was reviewing choices to hurry up the realm street enhancements.

Inexperienced sees the early buyout provides as a part of a broader plan to short-circuit neighborhood opposition in Modeste. “There’s a coordinated effort,” he mentioned, “between the parish, the state, these industries, and a few very, very rich actual property corporations, to intimidate and get residents out and forestall any type of solidarity between the residents.”

Hyundai is among the corporations that has jumped forward to make buyout provides outdoors the Parish-approved course of. 

Regulation agency Kurz & Hebert despatched a letter on behalf of Hyundai to Donaldsonville resident Paul Troxclair, who shared it with Inexperienced.

“We understand that [address] is your main residence and wish to be delicate to that,” the August 27 letter reads. “On account of Hyundai’s expertise, they understand their industrial improvement may negatively have an effect on the neighbors and the worth of their property sooner or later which is the explanation behind the supply.”

Hyundai supplied Troxclair $395,000, he mentioned, for his two adjoining properties, which collectively have a market worth of $366,700, in accordance with the Ascension Parish Assessor’s Workplace. However whereas the supply is 8% above the assessed worth, Troxclair mentioned he’s made enhancements to the property and added worth because it was final assessed in 2024. 

Troxclair additionally is aware of from first-hand expertise that the price of displacement is way increased than the market worth of property: he has been displaced as soon as earlier than, six years in the past, from Iberville Parish. That point it was for an growth by Shintech, a Japanese chemical producer.

In addition to the precise prices of shifting, some issues can’t be packed up nor changed, Troxclair defined. On his household land in Iberville, “we had orange timber, satsuma timber,” he recollects. “Pecan timber that we picked within the yard since we have been youngsters – they didn’t compensate us for none of our timber or something like that. And I spent 60 years of my life down there. They usually acquired folks right here [in Modeste] that’s been right here loads longer than that.”

The TJC Group, a guide group talking for Hyundai, instructed The Lens that “as of December 31, 2025, all of the land wanted for the event of Hyundai’s Louisiana Metal Mill has been voluntarily offered to the state of Louisiana,” and the State will lease it to Hyundai. “Hyundai just isn’t at present working with Kurz & Hebert or every other actual property agency.”

This summer season, Gene Landry, Mekaelyn Lavigne’s grandfather, was additionally amongst those that acquired a proposal. His supply, additionally from a agency representing Hyundai, was so low he threw it away, he mentioned. And even when it have been honest, he mentioned, he wouldn’t wish to depart a spot that has been in his household for greater than 100 years.

Black Modeste residents susceptible

Past their fears of low buyout provides, Modeste residents are susceptible in different methods. Some who face displacement are renters, not owners. Others face property-title hurdles which might be themselves the legacy of racism. 

Land successions are troublesome for large households. Possession can find yourself unfold throughout quite a few prolonged relations, and so one hold-out cousin can cease or delay a sale. Untangling property rights may be practically not possible for land that has been held in the identical households for generations as society and its legal guidelines modified round them. “These folks don’t have a title, or it has been tied up between so many relations as a result of they’re the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers residing there,” Gaignard mentioned.

Industrial improvement in Most cancers Alley is disproportionately concentrated in majority-Black areas like Modeste. 

Public opinion is likewise cut up alongside racial strains. A current survey in Ascension and St. James Parishes, commissioned by Sierra Membership’s Delta Chapter, discovered that 65% of Black respondents are “very involved” about poisonous air and air pollution of their neighborhood, versus simply 24% of white respondents. Requested whether or not native and state elected officers are doing sufficient to guard the general public’s well being from air pollution, 40% of Black respondents strongly disagreed, in contrast with simply 17% of white voters.

Although some jurisdictions designate areas for conservation functions to guard pure habitats, Ascension Parish for many years saved the farmland throughout the MegaPark-site zoned for  “conservation,” to forestall the traditionally Black space of Modeste from increase subdivisions, Gaignard mentioned. If that was the intent in Ascension, it could observe nationwide developments. Related exclusionary zoning designations have been made throughout the nation, and supported by the federal authorities after World Struggle II, as Black troopers returned dwelling and the fashionable Civil Rights motion started. 

However the Ascension Parish Council modified course in 2015, when it created the Overlay to rapidly make method for trade.

The legacy of enslavement flows immediately into current-day rezoning efforts, Gaignard mentioned. She imagines that native leaders have determined that since “free labor is now not out there, we have to determine a option to generate income off this land,” she mentioned. “And if we will’t get it off sugar cane, we’ll promote it to trade and promote out the folks which might be left on the land.”

MegaPark corporations might trigger hurt with out delivering jobs, advocates concern

The precise corporations who’ve set their sights on Ascension Parish – together with Hyundai and CF Industries – elevate alarms with some watchdogs, who warn that the firms are more likely to hurt public well being and destroy housing with out bringing the promised financial advantages.

Considerations about Hyundai embody its use of jail labor in Alabama, which drives down wages in Hyundai’s Southern manufacturing provide chain, in accordance with a November report from Columbia College’s Labor Lab. Within the Montgomery space, the place Hyundai suppliers are concentrated, auto-supplier wages are 7% to 9% decrease in comparison with related jobs in Alabama and close by states, the research discovered. Hyundai has not indicated whether or not it’s going to search to make use of jail labor in Louisiana.

“If Alabama already is determined by incarcerated labor to subsidize Hyundai’s labor costs- with documented decrease wages and better well being and security violations – what prevents that very same mannequin from being replicated in Louisiana?” Gaignard mentioned in an announcement.

One other RiverPlex MegaPark firm, CF Industries, has a plant close to Yazoo Metropolis in Mississippi that suffered an explosion final month, resulting in an ammonia leak and evacuations of close by residents. 

That worries some Modeste residents, as a result of CF’s proposed plant in Ascension can be the most important on the earth – thrice bigger than the Mississippi plant.

“I don’t perceive how the identical firm that simply put one other neighborhood by means of an explosion and evacuation can now attempt to persuade the folks of Modeste and Ascension Parish that constructing a brand new ammonia plant is protected,” mentioned Twila Collins, who lives only a mile from the proposed website in Modeste.

The lawsuit and “viva voce”

Gaignard took inspiration for the October lawsuit from a considerably stunning place: a lawsuit by conservative Louisiana AG Liz Murrill. Each lawsuits problem a voting strategy frequent all through Louisiana.

The argument is across the idea of “viva voce,” actually which means “with the residing voice.” It implies that legislators should vote by talking aloud – not with a present of arms, or utilizing an digital machine, or being requested for an objection. The thought is to make sure transparency, as legislators might not vote in silence and thereby escape public scrutiny.

Rural Roots’ swimsuit argues that Ascension Parish Council violated the Louisiana Structure and Louisiana’s Open Conferences Regulation by merely asking for objections on the rezoning vote, sidestepping audible votes from each councilmember.

“The Louisiana Lawyer Basic has lately identified that Louisiana legislation requires that voting by parish councils have to be ‘viva voce,’” reads the lawsuit.

Murrill used the same argument earlier this yr to accuse Caddo Parish Council of violating the ‘viva voce’ requirement on a way more superficial matter: a decision welcoming celebrated Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders to Shreveport.

A July vote ratifying “the Decision Welcoming U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (“Sanders Decision”) didn’t adjust to the viva voce voting necessities,” reads Murrill’s swimsuit. “Any type of silent, digital tallying that lacks an audible, spoken expression by every voting member is inadequate.”

If both is profitable, the lawsuits may push different Louisiana parishes to vary their voting practices. At the moment, the Baton Rouge Metro Council sometimes votes by means of unanimous consent. Others, just like the New Orleans Metropolis Council, vote electronically.

Gaignard and Murrill’s lawsuits may power a change. Bossier Metropolis has already dropped digital voting because of Murrill’s swimsuit. The New Orleans Metropolis Council is ready to see how the lawsuit performs out.

Adrian Alpay, one of many legal professionals on the Ascension case, instructed The Lens, “What we’re asking is fairly easy: that the members of the Ascension Parish Council observe state legislation and the Louisiana Structure. The general public has a proper to watch how their authorities votes.”

If the fits are profitable, they may make current legislative votes susceptible to challenges: fits filed inside 60 days can void votes.

In December, Rural Roots and Bucket Brigade filed two extra fits towards Ascension Parish Council and Ascension Financial Improvement Corp. for withholding public data and preserving the offers shrouded in secrecy by means of non-disclosure agreements.

Gaignard isn’t focused on monetary acquire, and is aware of that even when it’s profitable, the lawsuits filed across the MegaPark current extra of a hurdle than a real roadblock. Nonetheless, she desires the councilmembers’ votes recorded. If the Modeste she is aware of is misplaced, she desires public data to point out who selected to unstitch the material of their neighborhood.

“I simply need accountability,” she mentioned. “I need these leaders making this option to endlessly have it in writing…them being the demise of their very own neighborhood.”

Observe this hyperlink for a map of the proposed RiverPlex MegaPark and different Lens protection of the proposal.

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