Many Holy Cross residents remain adamantly opposed to the “revitalization” of the Alabo Street Wharf, a warehouse along the Mississippi River owned by the Port of New Orleans.
Sunrise Foods International plans to convert the wharf warehouse into “the first dedicated organic port in the United States.”
But the Alabo Wharf is located smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Neighbors need to know specifics, they say, because the facility will be located across the street and down the block from homes where elders and small children live.
People in favor of the $13 million facility hope that it will bring jobs to the economically fragile Lower 9th Ward neighborhood. Critics who oppose it envision a list of threats, basically in their backyards: respiratory problems from grain dust, safety concerns from small residential streets that would be traveled by dump trucks and freight trains, along with increased heat, noise and emissions from future vegetable-oil production.
But neighbors and local officials are not able to debate their specific concerns using known facts and projections. Instead, they are left with an information vacuum, they say.
Even Councilwoman Helena Moreno was stymied as she searched for facts about health and safety and the possible devaluation of property values. “As I sought accurate information for the public, it became evident that such information is not readily available on the Port of New Orleans website or the Sunrise Foods International website,” she wrote in a February letter.
Part of the problem is that the Alabo Wharf is owned by the Port of New Orleans, a state entity. The needed air permits are also issued by the state, through the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ). So, outside of zoning decisions, the City Council has little jurisdiction over the wharf. And the state seems unmoved by resident complaints.
As City Council President JP Morrell put it during a Council meeting, there’s an “unequal distribution of power between the Lower 9th Ward and the Port.”
At the end of April, following requests from some local officials, the LDEQ agreed to schedule a public-comment period and a public hearing on air-pollution permits proposed for the facility.
LDEQ has done neither. As of July 1, the agency has not opened online public comments or set a hearing date, according to public notices.
On the last day of February, following pressure from local officials, Sunrise Foods released a summary of an air-quality assessment calculating its potential environmental impact at the facility.
Experts who read the summary say that it contained such scant detail that it added little to the discussion.
“There’s not enough information there to constitute a meaningful analysis,” said research scientist Kimberly Terrell, who led community engagement at the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic until she resigned last month, saying that the university had muzzled the clinic to appease Gov. Jeff Landry.
There’s no examination of how grain dust and other facility pollutants would interact with existing pollution in the area — not in the Sunrise Foods air-quality assessment nor in the minor air permit application submitted to LDEQ. The application also doesn’t limit the amount of grain that can come through the terminal. Instead, it proposes limited working hours: nine hours per day, five days a week, with total annual operational hours not exceeding 2,340 hours per year.
The Sunrise Foods information also feels incomplete. Through public-information requests, neighbors obtained emails with the Port of New Orleans that include descriptions of a second phase. But the air-permit application covers only the first phase of the project. “That’s a tactic that we see over and over and over,” Terrell said. By not finalizing future project phases, “facilities (are able) to sidestep certain requirements, such as a requirement to do air-dispersion modeling that accounts for the whole picture,” she said.
In January, the New Orleans City Council approved a resolution “strongly urging” the state legislature “to conduct comprehensive environmental and social impact assessments regarding the proposed expansion of the Sunrise Foods grain terminal and rail line.”
The resolution is largely symbolic because the city lacks jurisdiction over the Port of New Orleans, a state agency.
But the resolution seems to have driven political sentiment. In recent months, several local officials, including Oliver Thomas and Helena Moreno, the city’s two at-large councilmembers, and state Sen. Joseph Bouie, pushed the Port to provide information on all phases of the project, including a detailed environmental assessment and a review of the project’s impact on the historic neighborhood, including property values.
“Our communities deserve to be informed and protected, not sidelined in the decision-making process,” wrote Thomas, a Lower 9 native. “Unfortunately, the lease was approved before city officials or the impacted community were even made aware of it. This lack of transparency is deeply concerning.”
For vessels coming from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River, the Alabo Street Wharf marks the first stop in Orleans Parish, a half-mile past St. Bernard Parish, where the Old Arabi Neighborhood Association has joined with its Orleans counterpart, the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, to oppose the Sunrise Foods development through an organization called Stop the Grain Train Coalition.
On June 17, the St. Bernard Parish Council unanimously adopted a resolution to support the coalition in its efforts to stop the Port of New Orleans and Sunrise Foods from repurposing and expanding the Alabo Street Wharf and reactivating the Norfolk Southern Rail lines along Alabo Street and St. Claude Avenue.
Why the push for foreign organic grain?
Starting in 2017, 48% of U.S. grocery shoppers purchased organic meats, exceeding those who did not, at 41%, according to a “Power of Meat” report issued by the Food Industry Association. As more consumers demand organic meat and dairy products, farmers need more organic feed for poultry, livestock and aquaculture. Yet the acreage in this country devoted to organic crops has decreased in recent years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
On a global level, the acreage for organic crops is growing. Sunrise Foods International operates multiple grain elevators across the U.S. and Canada. The company’s Turkish subsidiary operates a dedicated organic port in Giresun, Turkey. Sunrise Foods Europe describes itself as having “total control of our wholly owned supply chain,” including a logistics team overseeing freight operations in Turkey, which encompasses 1,000,000 metric tons (1,102,311 U.S. tons) of product traveling by truck, rail, vessel, barge and container.
In New Orleans, Sunrise Foods will primarily handle organic soybeans, soybean meal, sunflower meal, peas and wheat. The “transloading” facility – moving goods from boat to rail car – would become the first dedicated organic American port. Though some grain terminals are built for long-term storage and processing, the international company describes its future Alabo Street facility on its “SunriseNOLA” website as a specialized logistics hub for short-term transloading.
Essentially, Sunrise officials say, the wharf would transfer organic grain from a seafaring vessel to railroad cars traveling a maximum of 10 miles per hour along street-level, century-old tracks on Alabo Street. Only one vessel will arrive per month, Sunrise Foods estimates. Employees at the wharf would spend about five days unloading product from the vessel to store in the warehouse in designated bays for an average of 23 days, the company says.
Up to 10 covered rail cars will be loaded with grain daily, Sunrise projects. The timing of the trains, Sunrise spokespeople said, will be determined by Norfolk Southern, which did not return a request for comment.
Resistance from Holy Cross
Records show that Sunrise Foods initially approached Avondale Global Gateway in Jefferson Parish. It’s unclear why the Holy Cross neighborhood, located near the Holy Cross Historic District, was ultimately chosen for the industrial project.
In March, a proposed ordinance would have changed the zoning to industrial under the New Orleans Master Plan and Future Land Use Map. But opponents to the reindustrialization of Holy Cross worked with City Council President JP Morrell and Councilmember Helena Moreno to ensure the neighborhood surrounding the Alabo Wharf maintained residential zoning.
“In the Lower 9, I continue to voice concerns about the future of the Alabo Wharf,” Moreno wrote in a statement, “and (I) stand with neighbors in working to protect their quality of life.”
Lower 9 neighbors have felt besieged for nearly a year now.
The Holy Cross community first discovered that the Port of New Orleans signed a lease agreement with Sunrise Foods in September 2024. Since then, residents have packed every monthly board meeting at the Port of New Orleans office set on the river behind the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. The public-comment periods have grown to an hour or more, with officers of the Harbor Police Department lining the aisles.
Holy Cross residents and their allies have also sent more than 1,000 emails to LDEQ detailing why the Sunrise Foods project is inappropriate for the Lower 9 location.
Many of the email messages refer LDEQ to public records that outline detailed future potential plans for the facility, including additional storage space and a vegetable oil deodorization facility. Some of the email messages shared with The Lens ask LDEQ to consider what neighbors anticipate to be “insurmountable” cumulative impacts and the residential nature of the area surrounding the Alabo Wharf, which makes “this project…inappropriate for this location.”
“We implore the LDEQ to consider the profound and cumulative impacts this project has on the neighbors quite literally next door to this terminal. We are not simply opposed to development; we are fighting to protect our health, our homes, and our future,” wrote Jeffrey Wittenbrink Jr., who, along with fellow Holy Cross residents Dustin Dirickson and Joshua Anderson, drafted an email-message template that neighbors sent to LDEQ many times over.
Then, on June 4, LDEQ seems to have welched on both of its promises. Without public comment or a hearing, the agency approved Sunrise Foods’ request for expedited permit processing for the so-called minor source permit, the kind of permit given to facilities that are not deemed significant contributors to air-quality problems.
Sunrise Foods requested that the final minor source air permit decision be made “as quickly as possible.”