Reforming the Corp of Engineers

These beautiful fish and all the life I was seeing in and around this marsh are vanishing because the marsh is vanishing. Thanks in large measure to the Corps' levee system, it is racing inland at the appalling rate of one half mile per year. The map on your GPS will tell you you're about to crash into shore, but local watermen ignore it and keep going because no map is up to date, and with some you don't have to touch the throttle for five miles after the monitor declares "landfall." As the water deepens, waves break apart more marsh, further deep-ening the water and allowing still bigger waves. Meanwhile, as the slug of saltwater moves inland, bass, crappies, turtles, alligators, frogs and entire freshwater ecosystems expire. Principally through her marshes, Louisiana produces one quarter of the nation's seafood. But unless something drastic is done so that the Mississippi can again drop its silt inshore, Louisiana will lose all its coastal marshes and the creatures they sustain. And New Orleans will become a levee-rimmed goldfish bowl submerged in the sea.

I can't think of a more important sportfishing river in the South than the 107-mile-long Apalachicola that drains 21,794 square miles in Alabama, Georgia and Florida and bisects Florida's Panhandle from north to south. It has produced the state record redeye bass (7.83 pounds), the state record spotted bass (3.75 pounds), the state record striped bass (42.25 pounds), and the state record white bass (4.69 pounds). Yet to facilitate imaginary barge traffic it has been hacked up and flushed toilet-style by the Corps.

Dredging and spoil dumping have dest-royed wetlands and bottomland forests for a quarter of the river's length, reducing gamefish populations in these areas by 50 to 75 percent. At 60 feet in elevation, one of the spoil piles, known as "Sand Mountain," is the highest point in northern Florida. The spoil blocks access to spawning and nursery habitat in a maze of sloughs and side channels. Dredging alone wasn't sufficient to float barges, so the Corps provided water releases for what it called "navigation windows," thereby exterminating fry and eggs and triggering spawning behavior at precisely the wrong times. In 2000 a navigation window eliminated the year class of all gamefish in the river and upstream reservoirs. The flushing and dredging has degraded critical habitat of the threatened gulf sturgeon as well as threatened and endangered mussels, and it has damaged an estuarine ecosystem that produces 15 percent of the nation's oysters.

All this went down despite the fact that barge traffic was essentially non-existent. As early as 2000 Assistant Secretary of the Army Joseph Westphal stated in writing that maintaining navigation on the river at an annual cost of $10 million was "not economically justified or environmentally defensible." That year a grand total of 33 barges used the river. In 2003 only nine barges used the river, at a cost to US taxpayers of slightly more than $1 million per barge. To borrow the words of Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), it would have been "cheaper to ship cargo by limousine."

In 2004 the Corps applied for a new dredging permit on the Apalachicola River, then ignored the state's repeated requests for additional information. By October 11, 2005 the Florida Department of Environmental Protection had had enough. On that day it denied the Corps' request. "Florida has stood up to the Corps and given the river a new lease on life," declared Melissa Samet, senior director for water resources at American Rivers and co-chair of the Corps Reform Network. "As the river recovers from the damage that has been done, people can look forward to a healthier resource for themselves and their children to enjoy."

Attempts at reforming the Corps have been underway for some time. For instance, the House Ways and Means Committee complained of no less than 25 over-budget projects and called for "actual [Corps] reform, in the further prosecution of public works." The year was 1836. Upon vetoing a host of Corps boondoggles contained in the Rivers and Harbors Act, the President of the United States declared, "I cannot overstate my opposition to this kind of waste of public funds." The president was Dwight Eisenhower.

But the Army-engineered Katrina tragedy and the State of Florida's eloquent statement have gotten the public's attention as never before. Under the inspired leadership of Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI) and John McCain (R-AZ) the Senate has recently passed an omnibus bill (the Water Resources

Planning and Modernization Act of 2006) that would implement real Corps reforms, protecting fish, wildlife and taxpayers in the following important ways:

Priorities. The Senate bill would require the Corps to prioritize projects according to genuine needs of the American people rather than appetites and ambitions of the agency's congressional funders who use it as a conduit for funneling federal pork into their districts. And it would require the Corps to reduce flood danger by discour-aging unwise use of floodplains and by restoring flood-absorbing wetlands. Currently the agency has a $58 billion backlog of authorized projects--maybe 30 years worth. But it only gets $2 billion a year in construction funds.

Planning. The bill would modernize the Corps' planning process, which currently allows it to destroy wetlands and construct dams and levees that lure the public into harm's way. Under the new guidelines the Corps would be limited to projects that protect wetlands, fish, wildlife and the public.