Senate negotiators reached an agreement Tuesday to phase out the diversion of money from the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund to offset other federal spending by 2020, clearing the way for senators to move forward on a water resources authorization.
But action was temporarily held up when Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn filed a pair of amendments dealing with guns. Late Tuesday evening, senators reached a deal to hold the first series of votes Wednesday afternoon on the gun proposals.
"We're working on a critical infrastructure bill and the first two Republican amendments are not about jobs, not about business, not about commerce -- about guns," said Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the bill's sponsor. "We will deal with those amendments."
Coburn's amendments would lift a prohibition on possessing firearms at Army Corps of Engineers water projects and require agencies to report annually to Congress on all their purchases and thefts of firearms and purchases of ammunitions.
Senators will also vote on proposal by Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse that would authorize the creation of a national endowment to support restoration, protection and research on oceans, coasts and Great Lakes resources. Under the agreement, all three amendments will be subject to 60-vote thresholds and following the votes, the manager's amendment will become the base text of the bill.
Boxer said the water infrastructure bill shouldn't have amendments dealing with guns and urged lawmakers to keep further amendments germane to the measure.
"I don't quite get why we're voting on guns, but that's the Republicans' desire, that the first two votes be on guns," she said.
The proposal to bring the firearms issue back to the Senate floor came at the end of a day that featured progress toward resolving some of the big disagreements on the water bill (S 601). The manager's amendment settled a dispute between authorizers and appropriators over control of the trust fund. Currently, only about $900 million of the $1.6 billion collected annually through user fees on shippers is spent on dredging and other harbor projects. The bill originally would have dedicated the entire fund to port projects, but appropriators objected that language would necessitate deep cuts to other programs, including Energy Department research. The compromise would set minimum authorization levels increasing annually with the target of dedicating all the funds to harbor maintenance by 2020.
Under the agreement worked out between appropriators and authorizers, the Army Corps of Engineers would begin fiscal 2014 with a $1 billion floor of funding from the trust fund, which would increase by $100 million annually through fiscal 2019. Beginning in fiscal 2020, the funding floor would be established at a level of receipts plus interest received for the fiscal year. That modifies a provision in the earlier version of the bill that would have required a two-thirds Senate vote to reduce spending on projects financed by the trust fund below a previous year's level.
"We dealt with appropriations issues," said Boxer, whose committee unanimously reported out the bill in March. "We dealt with all the sticky issues. We're pretty happy. That's why no one's objecting to it."
Boxer praised Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., and ranking Republican Richard C. Shelby, R-Ala., for demonstrating "good faith" in agreeing to the compromise. "We have made substantial progress -- a big move in the right direction," agreed David Vitter of Louisiana, the Environment panel's ranking Republican. He called the legislative package a "genuine bipartisan reform oriented measure."
The manager's amendment unveiled ahead of Tuesday's debate addresses a variety of other issues in the bill as well, including disagreements about provisions designed to expedite the environmental reviews of projects and modifying the cost-share arrangement for a long-delayed Ohio River locks project that has been sucking up a large share of annual inland waterways funding. A draft of the amendment was circulating Tuesday among lawmakers and stakeholder groups.
Other Areas of Contention
Despite the agreement to begin debating the measure, plenty of obstacles remain.
The White House issued a Statement of Administration Policy on Monday that expressed strong criticisms of the bill.
While the statement avoided an explicit veto threat, it criticized lawmakers for ignoring President Barack Obama's own budget recommendations for ports and inland waterways projects. The administration also objected that provisions designed to expedite permitting for water projects would have negative environmental impacts and stifle public input.
Groups such as the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund share those concerns about changes to the environmental permitting process and have urged senators to oppose the expediting language.
The manager's amendment revealed Tuesday appears to address some of the environmentalist's concerns, but not all.
It would require the Army Corps to collaborate with other resource agencies responsible for reviewing the environmental impacts of a project to set deadlines for completing the studies, a change environmental groups should find favorable compared to the stricter timelines in the original bill. It also would clarify the role of other federal agencies in the permitting process, directing them to undertake their environmental reviews concurrently with those being done by other departments to the greatest extent possible.
Under the compromise, the Army Corps would have to issue guidance describing "programmatic approaches" that agencies involved in the environmental permitting process could follow. The guidance would be aimed at reducing duplicative discussions and assessments and would formalize a coordination process among participating agencies, including establishing a list of data needed to complete environmental reviews.
The language also would clarify that any financial penalties assessed against an agency for failing to make a permitting decision would come from the office of the agency leader and be transferred to the office tasked with completing the review. The fines would stand at $10,000 or $20,000 per week, depending on the type of environmental review past due.
Boxer defended her support for modifying the environmental permitting process for corps projects. She said Vitter insisted on expediting permitting because he was concerned about long and costly project delays. "I thought he had a point," she said.
Boxer said it was "important" to be able to assess financial penalties on agencies that miss deadlines. "We do cap those penalties, but the fact of the matter is we're here to do the people's business, and as long as we protect everyone's rights, which we do, and we bend over backwards to make sure all the agencies are involved and making sure the time frames around the [record of decision] are fair and they're involved, we say yes, you have to step up to the plate," she said.
Inland waterways advocates were hoping that separate legislation (S 407) authorizing river, lock and dam projects would be part of Boxer's manager's amendment. While the modified legislation does address a number of issues industry groups were looking for -- including a shift in financial responsibility for cost overruns at a long-delayed lock and dam project on the Ohio River and a demand for a Government Accountability Office study of its continued viability -- their requested overhaul of the Inland Waterways Trust Fund hasn't been included.
The industry's plan included an increase in the diesel tax that shippers pay to the Inland Waterways Trust Fund. The White House opposes the increase and instead called for a new per-vessel lockage fee that was outlined in its fiscal 2014 budget proposal and which the industry opposes.
For now, it appears neither will happen unless one of the bill's chief sponsors -- Sens. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., -- offers such a fix as an amendment. While the focus is now on the legislation at hand, industry lobbyists say they are also carefully monitoring negotiations that could lead to a comprehensive tax code overhaul, which would provide an opening to restructure user fees outside of the normal authorization process.
Earmarks as Oversight?
Army Corps of Engineers programs were last authorized in 2007 (PL 110-114). The Boxer-Vitter bill aims to create a structure that avoids project earmarks in response to a congressional moratorium on member-directed expenditures.
But in a rare example of the executive branch asserting the need for greater legislative authority, the White House statement criticized the bill for abdicating congressional oversight of the Army Corps of Engineers, which would be given responsibility for selecting the projects that are funded.
Fiscal watchdog groups such as Taxpayers for Common Sense oppose the bill on similar grounds. The organization, which was a leader in efforts to publicize congressionally mandated earmarks, contends that the lack of earmarks in the water bill is "in effect giving the Corps carte blanche to spend on projects of its own choosing."
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