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May 17, 2007"Family Fun" during the month of May
May 21, 2007A $14 billion bill passed Wednesday by the Senate would improve navigation on the upper Mississippi, help restore the Louisiana coast and authorize hundreds of projects that senators sought for their states.
The Water Resources Development Act, approved 91-4, also take steps to assure that the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for federal water projects, bases its work on sound economics and science. Corps projects have a history of being tainted by waste and abuse.
The bill is “about making sure that the water infrastructure in this country is up to the task that it faces,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who leads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
The bill enjoys wide popularity in Congress; a similar bill passed the House last month on a 394-25 vote. But it has had trouble passing in recent years because of criticism of Corps operations and charges that the measure is full of pork-barrel spending.
The original water project act, passed in 1986, envisioned renewal every two years. But the last bill to clear Congress was in 2000.
The White House said it opposed both the House and Senate bills because they were too expensive, assigned the Corps projects outside its main missions and increases the federal cost-share for many projects.
But Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee and one of the Senate’s more conservative members, said the bill was crucial because two-thirds of all consumer goods pass through harbors maintained by the Corps.
The nearly 12,000 miles of inland and intracoastal waterways include 192 commercially active lock and dam sites. More than half of those sites are 50 years and older and need major rehabilitation, he said.
About one-fourth of the authorized money, some $3.5 billion, goes to Hurricane Katrina-damaged Louisiana.
“It helps us to strengthen our hurricane defenses, restores the great wetlands through southwest Louisiana and invests in navigational channels that support the port structure,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.
Landrieu said the bill was amended to expedite the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet n a 76-mile shipping channel that is considered by many to have been a contributing factor in the region’s flooding after Katrina. In addition, she said it authorizes several key hurricane protection projects, including $886 million for Morganza to the Gulf, which is a series of levees, locks and other systems through Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes that will, when complete, serve to protect more than 120,000 people and 1,700 square miles of land against storm surge.
The upper Mississippi and Illinois River area would get $1.95 billion for seven new locks and $1.7 billion for ecosystem restoration.
The watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense said it had counted 438 earmarks, or lawmaker-requested projects, in the bill and estimated the total cost at $14.9 billion, rather than the $13.9 billion figure quoted by Senate sponsors.
“There is a lot of parochial buried treasure in this bill that taxpayers won’t find out about until months or years later,” said Stephen Ellis, vice president of the organization.
According to the organization’s breakdown, which does not include projects where the dollar amount is unclear, the bill specifies total costs of more than $2 billion for projects in California and $2 billion for Florida, with most of that for Everglades restoration.
Ellis did praise the legislation as being the first Senate bill to disclose the names of all earmark sponsors.
Larry Schweiger, president and chief executive of the National Wildlife Federation, said “the most stunning aspect of the bill” involves changes ordered for the Corps of Engineers, including requiring independent review of larger projects and modernizing agency planning procedures.
“This agency has been stuck in the 19th century for too long and as a result has run amok with pork-barrel spending and poorly planned projects,” he said.
Schweiger expressed regret that the Senate on Tuesday rejected proposals to require the Corps to consider global warming in planning flood and storm damage prevention projects, and a commission on prioritizing projects.
Taxpayer groups and environmentalists point out the Corps has a backlog of $58 billion unstarted projects that would, at a spending rate of about $2 billion a year, take decades to clear.
