Reforming the Corp of Engineers

Independent review. The bill would require outside review of projects to ensure that they are properly designed, cost effective, and that they reduce rather than augment flood damage. In July there was a major showdown on the Senate floor. After Senators Feingold, McCain and others got their independent-review amendment approved Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, and Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), chair of the subcommittee that handles water-resources bills, moved to substitute their own sham review provision. It failed by a vote of 51-49.

Mitigation. The bill would hold the Corps to the same standards the agency imposes on other wetland developers--i.e. require it to compensate for impacts to wetlands and other fish and wildlife habitat by restoring or re-creating it elsewhere.

The House bill, on the other hand, is worthless. And at this writing compromise legislation has failed in conference due to conflicts over the reforms as well as more than 100 projects (many of them traditional Corps boondoggles). Still, the fact that reforms are at last being seriously debated is encouraging.

"This is a pregnant moment," says David Conrad of the National Wildlife Federation. "We're seeing the Corps involved in some important restoration activities critical to the long-term viability and health of some of nation's most important ecosystems. And Congress has been throwing all responsibility to the wind, authorizing anything and everything that comes along, including reducing non-federal responsibilities for existing projects and piling additional burdens on US taxpayers. As a result the chance for restoration--the really important work of the Corps in the 21st Century--is slipping away."

Occasionally the Corps does do some good work, most of which is undoing its past bad work. On Massachusetts' Charles River, for example, it flabbergasted the environmental community way back in 1972 by coming out against a proposal for an expensive and ineffective flood-control dam and instead recommending and later implementing permanent protection for 8,500 acres of upstream wetlands as part of its "Natural Valley Storage Project." On the Missouri River it restored a side channel near Nebraska City to aid native fish. On the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, it modified existing flood control to provide anadromous fish with access to five miles of the mainstem. On the Mississippi, between St. Paul and St. Louis, it restored 28,000 acres of aquatic habitat. In Washington state the Corps, in cooperation with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, invited combat engineers from the 14th Engineer Battalion to practice operations by blowing a hole in a levee near the mouth of the Skagit River, thereby restoring tidal flows and access of salmonid smolts to the rich estuary where they can grow large enough to stand a decent chance of surviving ocean predators. Having gutterized Florida's serpentine Kissimmee River so that it no longer filtered sediments but shot them directly into Lake Okeechobee (by most accounts the best bass lake in the world), the Corps set about restoring the "crooked" places created by "the engineer of all eternity." And, having nearly destroyed the Everglades with its drainage and channelization projects, the Corps is spending $8 billion on a partial fix-it job. "This is by far the largest aquatic ecosystem restoration project in history," says Conrad. "All eyes in the water-resources world are watching this to see what these Americans are trying to do."

American taxpayers need to insist that this kind of work be the new mission for the US Army Corps of Engineers. They won't get any argument from the Corps, which doesn't care what it does so long as it keeps busy. Like a hunting dog it is equally happy working constructively in the field or digging in the tulips. And, as it has demonstrated with a small percentage of projects, it can ladle out just as much federal pork by repairing fish and wildlife habitat as by destroying it.