Greenfield Louisiana LLC, the Colorado-based company seeking to build a controversial grain elevator in St. John the Baptist Parish, has continued work on the project using a consulting firm that a former employee-turned-whistleblower accused of misconduct, documents obtained by The Lens show.
Greenfield hired the company, Gulf South Research Corporation (GSRC), to conduct a “cultural resource survey” on the proposed location of the grain elevator project to investigate whether construction would harm nearby sites of historical significance. The grain elevator would be located near former plantations, prompting concerns that there may be unmarked burial sites of enslaved people on the land.
But GSRC’s report, submitted in October 2021 to state and federal agencies, including the Army Corps of Engineers, as part of Greenfield’s permitting process, said that the company found no evidence of any unmarked graves. The finding, however, came under public scrutiny after the whistleblower account emerged, as reported by ProPublica, claiming Greenfield improperly pressured GSRC to alter its true findings. The whistleblower, Erin Edwards, asserted that her stated concerns that the proposed site may harm cultural resources, like the unmarked burial grounds of those once enslaved in the area, were elided from GSRC’s final version.
In late June, about a month after ProPublica published its investigation, the Corps publicly stated that it found the report submitted by GSRC to be...
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