Last week a state judge ruled that yes, Ascension Parish must release the non-disclosure agreements that parish officials have signed regarding the parish’s radical plan to extend Cancer Alley. We first asked for public records – emphasis there on PUBLIC – back in September 2025. Nine months later, the parish still hasn’t given us a single piece of paper. Now, a judge has told them they have to cough up the agreements that shroud parish plans in secrecy.

The Ascension Parish government strategy is clear: box the public out of its radical industrialization of the West Bank. Given the scale of the project, there must be a lot to hide. Plans for 17,000 acres of land include a hydrogen hub, at least three carbon capture pipelines, a 2.7-gigawatt gas fired power plant, a Hyundai steel plant and CF ammonia facility. Preliminary permit applications detail that the greenhouse gas emissions from the complex would total 28 million tons of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) a year.

The judge ruled in our favor and yet… the parish is still refusing to give us the non-disclosure agreements. The parish is appealing, kicking the can further down the road.

We must clear-eyed in this moment in our country: government accountability has taken a back seat to self-enrichment. Just look what has happened with the land surrounding the data centers in north Louisiana. Who knows what the Ascension Parish government is really up to? But we won’t quit in our quest to find out.

Thanks for standing with us,

Anne Rolfes
Director

P.S. We are back in court today challenging yet another Ascension Parish entity: the Ascension Economic Development Corporation.

[Photo: Hyundai Steel Sign on Former-Plantation that is included in the Proposed-Site of The RiverPlex MegaPark in Ascension Parish. ]