by Paul Quinlan
The barge shipping industry today pushed back against a taxpayer watchdog group that labeled its bill to rebuild U.S. locks, dams and waterways a "ripoff."
The bill, known as the "WAVE4 Act," for Waterways are Vital for the Economy, Energy, Efficiency and Environment, aims to boost spending on the nation's aging inland waterway infrastructure, nearly 60 percent of which has surpassed its useful life.
More than $8 billion in urgent construction and repair work is needed, the industry argues, to forestall a major disruption of barge traffic along the waterway system -- or, worse, a catastrophic failure.
Barge shippers are pushing a plan that Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) recently introduced as legislation (H.R. 4342) (E&ENews PM, March 30).
Critics, including the Obama administration, say the proposal fails to correct a federal subsidy of the system of more than 90 percent. Yesterday, the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense said the legislation would actually increase the cost burden on the federal government and labeled the bill the "Riverboat Ripoff" (E&ENews PM, April 12).
That assumes that the overall spending on the system increases, as industry has advocated, said Mike Toohey, president and CEO of the Waterways Council Inc., the industry's lobbying arm.
The rationale behind the potential increase, Toohey said, is that other users of the waterways system benefit but pay nothing toward its maintenance, such as hydroelectric power consumers, users of dammed water supplies and recreational boaters.
"The reason it increases is that it recognizes that other beneficiaries of the system need to be accounted for," Toohey said. "To the extent there's a subsidy currently, there's a lot of free riders."
Toohey added that the federal government covered 100 percent of the costs of the more-than-century-old waterways system until 1986, when Congress established a cost-sharing formula. Projects now tend to stretch on for decades because of federal mismanagement, forcing the industry to share in cost overruns of 300 percent-plus on some projects.
The bill calls for reforming the system by prioritizing only projects for which approval and full funding is secure -- a reform that Toohey said "would save a tremendous amount of money for the taxpayer."
The taxpayers group said it was skeptical of such claims.
"Anytime people tell me they're going to be saving though efficiency, I don't count it," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "We hear that all the time."
The Whitfield bill represents the industry's attempt to take to Congress the proposal that the Obama administration has rejected in favor of raising fees on shippers to generate an additional $1 billion for the system over the next decade (Greenwire, Oct. 10, 2011).
While the industry-authored Whitfield bill calls for a self-imposed fuel tax increase from 20 cents to 26 cents per gallon, it would also shift some heavy system costs now split between industry and the federal government entirely onto the feds.
Toohey called the argument that this would increase the federal government's cost burden "a highly speculative claim."
Discussion
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