In the furor of the political debates over immigration, intelligence leaks and the war in Iraq, a very important bill is being debated in Congress in relative quiet. The goal of this bill, titled the Water Resources Planning and Modernization Act of 2006 (S.2288), is to refine and modernize the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Spurring this effort is the partial destruction of the city of New Orleans (the greatest engineering disaster in America's recent history) that is due in significant part to the misplaced priorities and outright incompetence of the Corps.
The New Orleans levee failures, a potential hazard recognized for more than 40 years, were the final straw that led Senators Russ Feingold and John McCain to introduce the Corps reform bill. It is legislation that is long overdue.
The Feingold-McCain bill will:
-- Provide independent oversight by outside agencies on major Corps projects to assure reasonable estimates of project benefits;
-- Steer the agency and Congress toward societal rather than political priorities; and
-- Modernize the Corps' project goals to include environmental values -- not just economic ones, as is the case at present.
These reforms are badly needed. In March 2006, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) provided testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Resources that revealed a number of major shortcomings in the Corps' current approach to project planning and management. For example, the GAO found:
-- Annual economic benefits for a proposed Corps project to deepen the Delaware River to improve ship traffic would be about $13.3 million a year, compared to the $40.1 million claimed by the Corps.
-- In an analysis of the Oregon Inlet Jetty project along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the benefits claimed by the Corps exceeded those found by GAO by 90 percent.
-- In the Sacramento River flood protection project, the Corps overcounted and overvalued the properties protected.
The Corps' overestimation of projects' benefits has been responsible for some spectacular pork-barrel spending, including the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway, a $2 billion shipping canal in Alabama and Mississippi, and the $100 million Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), a rock-lined canal that leads from New Orleans to the open Gulf of Mexico. Both canals are seldom used.
Ill designed and poorly maintained, the MRGO canal exacerbated the effects of Hurricane Katrina's storm surge on the City of New Orleans. Most of the flooding that inundated the city resulted from levee and canal margin failures rather than overtopping. Critics of the Corps predicted this hazard but, as so often happens, the Corps ignored the criticism.
Over the last five years, the Corps has spent $1.9 billion in Louisiana, more than in any other state. Even though it was widely recognized during that time that the levees were highly vulnerable to a storm, they remained untouched. What higher priority could there be for the state of Louisiana, and perhaps the nation, than the protection of a major city by its levees?
What this illustrates is that the Corps is driven by political rather than national priorities. Unlike most other government agencies, the Corps is funded on a project-by-project basis. Without projects, the Corps can't survive.
Unfortunately, the priorities of the American people, including the preservation of New Orleans, often take a back seat to the whims of politicians who supported other projects. In this sense, the Louisiana congressional delegation and other politicians must share the blame for destruction caused by the failed levees. But it is inexcusable that the nation's engineering agency failed to shout from the rooftops that the levees needed fixing.
The Water Resources Planning and Modernization Act is long overdue, and will be a major step forward in protecting our cities and preserving our natural environments for future generations.