WASHINGTON • For decades, members of Congress used earmarks to direct the Army Corps of Engineers on which water projects to build, and where. Taxpayer groups called it “the iron triangle,” an alliance between Congress, the corps and local interests with clout.
To Tom Waters, a Missouri farmer who leads a group that fights for improvements to levees, that method of funding worked out just fine.
But then came an earmarks moratorium in Washington that has thrown the process of building water projects into uncertainty.
Lacking earmarks last year, Congress failed to pass a Water Resources Development Act, a bountiful piece of legislation that used to emerge from Congress brimming with work orders for the corps.
A new effort in Congress to pass a water bill is on a fast track, and what happens will be closely watched in the St. Louis region. The corps is a key player in floods and drought, navigation and, in recent years, river restoration.
Shippers on the Mississippi, which was rendered nearly impassable at times this winter due to drought, are especially tuned in while pushing a multibillion-dollar plan to rebuild aging locks.
The new post-earmarks relationship between the corps and Congress also is being tested in a renewed push by Missouri senators to decide a Missouri levee project, a plan that a high-ranking corps official once labeled “an economic dud with huge environmental consequences.”
All the uncertainty is troubling to corps watchers like Waters, president of the Missouri Levee and Drainage District Association. He is concerned about what he sees as the corps’ slackened pace in stabilizing banks along the Missouri River to stop erosion.
“The way I see it going, the corps gets a bucket of money and corps bureaucrats decide how to divvy it up,” said Waters, of Orrick, Mo.
Referring to would-be reformers, he added: “I understand where these people are going on earmarks, but that’s how the corps got its money. And that was how projects got done.”
‘GOLDEN HANDCUFFS’
The last water bill, with some $30 billion worth of projects, passed the Congress in 2007 when Congress overrode George W. Bush’s veto. With pent-up demand, things could move swiftly in the new Congress this time around — if proponents can find creative ways around the earmark prohibition.
Key committees used to send letters around Congress asking what members wanted in a water bill. Staff would cull out the least defensible requests, but some 300 House members might end up with an earmark they could trumpet in press releases — and a bill they could vote for.
Already in the new Congress, Sen. Claire McCaskill has introduced her proposal to write the earmarks ban into law. Even without earmarks, she argued, Missouri “will be able to compete just fine” under a system that awards corps projects on merit rather than “how long a member of Congress has been here or on what committees they serve on.”
“There’s this notion that somehow under earmarks, things worked out so good,” she said. “Well, there’s a $60 billion backlog of authorized projects through earmarking.”
The corps, McCaskill added, “has been able to hide behind the golden handcuffs of Congress. And sometimes they’re not held as accountable as they should be because they can say, ‘We’re just doing the earmarked projects we’ve been directed to do’.”
Congress is struggling in the new order to keep hold of the reins. Frustration sounded in a Senate hearing this month with the corps’ commanding general and his Pentagon boss called to testify.
Sen. David Vitter, R-La., complained that the corps is “transforming into a red tape-driven bureaucracy … The corps ignores mandates from Congress when it chooses to, when it doesn’t want to do something.”
Last year, watchdog groups argued that Congress was seeking a way around the earmark moratorium by establishing 26 separate funds for the corps to spend in its annual appropriation.
“They (the corps) are still basically operating the same, without long-term planning and looking at satisfying particular members of Congress. They know where their bread is buttered,” asserted Josh Sewell, an analyst with Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit group in Washington.
Jo-Ellen Darcy, the Army official in charge of the corps’ civil works program, told those complaining senators that the corps is “actively modernizing its planning program” — which includes sorting through hundreds of projects authorized over the years.
MISSOURI PROJECTS
IN THE BALANCE
It would be hard to find a project that’s been around longer than the proposed construction at St. John’s Bayou-New Madrid Floodway, an elaborate levee and pumping system that Congress authorized in the 1950s to keep the Mississippi River from flooding communities and farmland in southeast Missouri.
It might also be hard to find a water project that has generated more studies and controversy.
Blocked by a District of Columbia federal judge in 2007 for running afoul of environmental rules, the $160 million plan to plug the last Missouri connection between the river and its flood plain is blinking bright on the radar in Washington once more, thanks to a push by Missouri’s senators.
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., went so far last week as to threaten to block confirmation of the new and as-yet-unnamed head of the Environmental Protection Agency. A single senator can do so simply by invoking a parliamentary procedure called a “hold.”
Blunt says he supports the project; McCaskill says at this point, she just wants federal agencies to make a decision.
The EPA, Fish and Wildlife Service and the corps are attempting to work through differences that have proved irreconcilable for decades over just how much wetlands would be affected and what it would take to repair damage.
As the Fish and Wildlife field supervisor in Missouri, Charles Scott worked for 12 years to shape a project that would be less destructive to wildlife than the one planned. Scott, who retired last year, sees the outcome of the dispute as a test of the corps’ relationship with Congress.
“In the absence of earmarks, the corps is going to have to figure out its priorities,” Scott said. “In light of all the other problems in the country, they have to decide whether they want to focus on a project in which 90 percent of the benefit goes to agriculture.”
Awaiting congressional action, the shipping industry, conservationists and taxpayer advocates are trying to maneuver in Washington’s tricky new waters.
The Waterways Council, which represents shippers on the Mississippi and other rivers, is seeking funding of $380 million annually for the next 20 years as part of the water bill in order to fix a lock system that the industry describes as decrepit.
Part of the problem is the corps’ failure to complete the Olmsted Lock and Dam on the Ohio River in Southern Illinois. The project has tripled in cost and fallen a remarkable 10 years behind schedule while depleting the Inland Waterway Trust Fund, which is supported by fuel taxes on shippers.
The industry says it is would absorb higher fuel taxes to bolster the fund in return for taxpayers also putting more into the fund, taking over maintenance at dams and funding Olmsted out of the general treasury.
As things stand, said the Waterways Council’s Debra Colbert, the lock replacement at Saverton, Mo., won’t get done until 2083. At the Winfield, Mo., dam, it would be 2090, she added.
“Have you ever seen 2090 in print before?” Colbert asked.”We just can’t keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them.”
Written by: Bill Lambrecht
Original Publication URL: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/congress-and-corps-of-engineers-struggle-to-chart-water-work/article_fa566a9e-6d10-5f9a-919d-212abe0a82b8.html
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