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River Politics: Framing the Issue

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What is the navigation system?

The navigation system of the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers is composed largely of a series of concrete dams and locks, designed solely to support river navigation.

Minnesota's first lock and dam was built in 1917 in the Twin Cities. Today the state has six locks and dams in different locations along the Mississippi—at St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis; opposite the Ford Motor Plant in St. Paul; near Hastings; at Welch, near Red Wing; in Minnesota City; and in La Crescent. The St. Paul District of the Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for the day-to-day maintenance and operation of these structures. There are 29 locks and dams along the Mississippi—one every 10 to 25 miles or so, from Minneapolis to St. Louis. The Illinois River, which joins the Mississippi just north of St. Louis, has eight locks.

The lock and dam system transformed the previously free-flowing river into a stair-stepped series of lake-like pools of water for over 600 miles. As such, the areas of the river between locks are referred to as "pools," numbered for the downstream dam that creates each pool (for instance, the area between the first and second locks is referred to as "Pool 2"). Boats and towboats pushing barges pass from one pool to another by first entering a chamber (the lock), where a watertight gate closes behind them. The water level is adjusted up or down to match the next level. Then, gates open at the other end of the chamber and the boat goes on its way. Most barges today are tied together in a series twice as long as the lock chamber; "locking through" means separating the barge into two halves to go through a lock, and reconnecting in the next pool.

The Corps has constructed approximately 1,600 miles of levees (embankments to prevent flooding) on the Mississippi, mostly below St. Louis where there are no locks and dams. The lower river has been straightened and bounded with levees so that 430 miles of river bends have been cut off and 90% of the floodplain is now separated from the river channel. Such modifications to support river commerce have been made to dozens of rivers nationwide and collectively are referred to as the inland waterway system.

Approximately 14% of the nation's bulk commerce (including cement, fertilizer, and agricultural commodities) is shipped on inland waterways. Eighty percent of the barge traffic moves on the Mississippi River—half entering the river between Minnesota and St. Louis, and the other half entering via the Ohio River. In Louisiana, petrochemical, aluminum and petroleum products join the barge traffic. The greatest volume of traffic on the Mississippi occurs on the 100 miles between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico via the Southwest Pass. By comparison, five times more freight moves by railroad than by barges on the inland waterway system.

A history of changes on the Mississippi River

As early as the mid-1830s, the federal government began projects on the Upper Mississippi River to enhance navigation. Most of those early efforts were limited to removing impediments—for example, removing sandbars or fallen trees and brush. The most ambitious projects involved dynamiting rapids to create a clear passage.

Water depth soon became the focus of efforts to facilitate river navigation. If low-water seasons and unpredictability of river depth could be controlled, large boats could move up and down the river without danger of running aground or encountering other hazards. In 1878, the amount of dredging, debris removal, and channel constriction picked up considerably when the U.S. Congress authorized deepening the river to four-and-a-half-feet. Then, in 1907, Congress approved further deepening the channel to six feet.

These depth increases were achieved by artificially "squeezing" the river. Structures known as wing dams were constructed of stones, felled trees, and brush. They were built perpendicular to the river's shore and redirected water flow to the center, forcing the river to deepen its own channel. There are about 3,000 such structures in the river's floodplain between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Cairo, Illinois. By 1940, with additional government authorizations, the lock and dam system and a minimum navigation channel nine feet deep was created, costing (in unadjusted dollars) about $160 million.

Creating the Corps

The modern-day Army Corps of Engineers was created by the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1866, which united two engineering agencies and charged them with managing all navigation projects on the inland waterway system. In part, the need to improve inland waterways was due to dissatisfaction with the railroad industry's high shipping fees; interest in creating a more viable waterway system was highest among those business owners who believed the fees were excessive.

Since 1974, Congress has provided authorization for new Corps water projects through the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA). The act is typically passed every two years, and includes a variety of projects ranging from routine to more controversial projects such as dredging river channels, stabilizing riverbanks, and depositing sand on beaches. The act also offers members of Congress the opportunity to authorize projects that will ultimately bring funding to their home districts. The most recent WRDA was enacted in 2000.

Throughout its history, the Corps has been influenced by society's views of the environment and natural resources. The main emphasis on the Mississippi in the latter half of the 19th century was maintaining a navigable river with little regard to impacts on water quality, wildlife, and rare species. Today, many citizens have come to see the Mississippi River as more than just an inland navigation system. As environmental conservation has become a growing public concern, the Corps has come under increased pressure to reduce the environmental impacts of its proposed projects and to properly determine each project's economic values. These concerns, as well as the question of changing the Corps' operating procedures, blocked passage of WRDA in 2002.

Current controversy

Whether some of the lock and dam structures aiding navigation on the Mississippi River system should be altered has been an ongoing controversy for more than 10 years. The Corps' Upper Mississippi River and Illinois Waterway System Navigation Feasibility Study (Navigation Study) began in 1989 and was originally scheduled for completion by 1996. In 2001, it was refocused and a draft report is due out September of 2003. The study has cost approximately $60 million to date. The study is a microcosm of the debate about how the Corps operates, as well as its role in natural resources management.

Originally, the Navigation Study was meant to investigate possible solutions to relieve barge congestion on the two rivers and to explore potential environmental impacts. The barge industry claims that the current locks are not long enough to efficiently process today's assemblage of barges and tows. They want to double the size of some of the lock chambers so barges can pass through more quickly without having to unlink. Others believe that the Corps doesn't have sound economic justification or an environmental mitigation plan to expand locks on the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, and that the expansion would imperil the river's health, which is already degraded from environmentally damaging practices of the past. Furthermore, some advocate less costly, more easily implemented efficiencies to relieve congestion—for example, better traffic management and low-cost measures to facilitate barge movement as needed.

Whistleblower spurs further investigations

In 2000, a civilian employee of the Corps, Donald Sweeney, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Navigation Study. Using the best and most current calculation methods, Sweeney argued that lock expansion was not justified. He subsequently refused orders to alter economic calculations to justify lock expansion, an action that led to his removal from a position he had held for more than two decades. For exposing the flawed study, Sweeney was recognized with the 2002 "Environmental, Science and Technology Service to America" medal, sponsored by the Partnership for Public Service and Government Executive magazine, to honor extraordinary acts or achievement by career civil servants. (Sweeney remains a Corps employee, assigned to the University of Missouri through an intergovernmental agreement.)

The Pentagon's Inspector General conducted an internal review that supported Sweeney's claims. Perhaps more disturbing than a flawed Navigation Study, the Pentagon also found that the Corps was advocating numerous large projects to ensure its own perpetuation and budget appropriations—namely, a secret "grow the Corps" agenda embraced by the Corps leadership. The investigation found that a consequence of this secret agenda was that the barge industry had an inordinate amount of influence on the Corps' decision making. The Pentagon ultimately recommended disciplinary action against select individuals in Corps leadership. Two two-star generals and a colonel were disciplined and retired from service.

The National Research Council of the National Academy of Science subsequently confirmed both Sweeney's and the Pentagon's conclusions, and detailed additional failings within the Corps' study. The academy criticized the study's one-dimensional nature—considering lock expansion as the only way to reduce congestion, to the exclusion of other less expensive alternatives. It also found that the study used an antiquated method of cost-benefit analysis, misrepresented how farmers sell and transport their crops, and exaggerated crop and traffic projections.

More findings and broader oversight encouraged

In 2000, the Washington Post's Michael Grunwald wrote an award-winning investigative series that documented problems with the Corps' planning process, including those associated with the Navigation Study. Grunwald's articles increased public awareness of problems in the Corps by citing further evidence of "institutional bias" and strong pressure within the Corps to create projects in order to expand budgets. The series also documented the extent to which the Corps' operations are largely unchecked, with few internal and no external safeguards or measures to judge a project's impact.

While the Corps' institutional shortcomings were being documented by the Washington Post, the National Academy of Sciences, the Office of Management and Budget, the General Accounting Office (the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress), and the Army's Inspector General also issued reports that separately corroborated the existence of significant problems with the Corps' planning process and that advocated a reordering of the Corps' priorities and its method of selecting projects.

In response to these charges, the Corps restructured the Navigation Study to evaluate environmental restoration. Although the restructured study acknowledges the weaknesses in previous computations for barge traffic and how commerce moves on the river, it states that a new computation method can't be developed because of time constraints.

Beyond the Mississippi

The call for overhauling the Corps' procedures is being fueled not only by issues in the Mississippi River Basin, but also by projects across the country. For instance, the Colombia River has been deepened several times. Flowing from Columbia Lake in British Columbia toward Portland, Oregon, the Lower Columbia is a 106-mile navigation channel to the Pacific Ocean that has seen relatively flat commercial shipping traffic levels since 1995. The Port of Portland competes with ports in Puget Sound, Oakland, and Los Angeles.

Similar to the scenario with the Mississippi River, the navigation industry, growers, and manufacturers who use the port have led the call to deepen the channel again from 40 to 43 feet. The Corps twice performed an economic analysis, finding both times that spending $188 million on the project was justified. The Corps' cost-benefit analysis determined that for every dollar spent on deepening, approximately two dollars would result from increased port usage. But this analysis did not stand up to scrutiny.

The Portland Oregonian conducted a six-month review of the project and found that the project would actually produce 88 cents of benefits for every dollar spent, that the Corps based much of its analysis on inaccurate commodity projections, and that political pressure to build the project resulted in a compromised environmental mitigation plan. The Corps had been alerted to many of these shortcomings after the first study, but did not address them.

The Corps has encountered similar criticism with its plan to deepen the Delaware River shipping channel. This time the General Accounting Office found that the project would return less than 50 cents for each dollar spent and would endanger the environmental recovery of the Delaware River.

What a good project looks like

Despite all of this, there is broad agreement that the Corps' expertise can be useful when harnessed to community interests, in ways that spur economic development through restoration, tourism, and recreation. Two projects are illustrative. The Comprehensive Florida Everglades Restoration Project has proven to be complex and contentious, but still has achieved the support of a variety of constituencies. In California, the Napa Valley Flood Control Project is seen as both a solution to the Napa River flood problem and a tool for economic revitalization.

The Everglades Restoration Project, an $8 billion undertaking involving 12 million acres of wetlands, seeks to undo a half-century of land and water alterations begun in 1948 with the construction of levees and canals designed to accommodate Florida's building boom and provide more land for sugar cultivation. The alterations, by changing drainage patterns, essentially drowned the Everglades in rainy weather and dehydrated them in dry weather. The Project seeks to restore a natural flow of fresh water to the Everglades, protect surrounding lagoons and rivers from further pollution, and ensure fresh water for human use.

There are concerns, however, that the Project relies on untested water storage methods and is driven by competing objectives. For example, the former EPA Director in South Florida claimed that the project had become more about providing water for cities and agriculture than restoring the Everglades. Given the scope of the project, such valid concerns are not surprising and deserve to be addressed.

The Napa Valley Flood Control Project seeks to restore the Napa River flood plain, allowing the river to flow as naturally as possible. The city of Napa is the third most flood-prone community in California, having suffered more than $500 million dollars in damages during a half-dozen floods in the past forty years. Since the mid-1970s, the Corps had attempted to convince the community to adopt the standard river channelization approach—which the community repeatedly rejected. But in the mid-1990s, citizens groups, the City, and the County engaged technical advisors and worked with the Corps to chart a new course to accomplish the community's objectives. One of the major components of the campaign was a public education piece that invigorated broader public interest in a restored Napa River. This campaign was enough of a success to convince two-thirds of Napa County voters to support a sales tax increase to help match federal monies. The result was a more environmentally sound approach to reduce flood damages and reconnect the floodplain to the river in many locations, improving the river's biological health and productivity. There is minimal use of standard flood control structures, frequently flooded buildings are removed to higher ground, marshlands are restored, and bridges are improved to better pass floodwaters.

Prior to the restoration plan, the river's banks were strewn with refuse, abandoned warehouses, garbage dumps, and lots for towed cars. Now, local developers are betting on a river restoration-inspired revival, which will affect the entire downtown. The flood control project will stretch seven miles along the river and is expected to be completed by 2006 at a cost of approximately $250 million. It represents the largest public works project in Napa County's history. The project is overseen by five federal and state agencies and continues to proceed on schedule.

Both the Everglades restoration and the Napa Valley flood control project have faced criticisms from citizen groups, environmental conservation organizations, and taxpayer organizations along the way. Yet, each of these projects has evolved with the broad support of the community. Unlike proposed lock expansion on the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, the projected benefits of these two projects go beyond a particular corporate or commercial interest.

Recent developments

The cumulative effect of the growing criticisms of Corps practices is opportunity for change, and is generally termed "Corps Reform." Advocates of reforms believe the Corps' projects and operations reflect the interests of only waterborne commerce and politics and not the interests of the broader community of resource users, taxpayers, and the environment.

Efforts on at least four fronts may alter how water development and restoration projects are planned, designed, funded, and managed:

1. The Bush Administration's 2004 budget proposal called for reforms. The Office of Management and Budget—an Executive Branch agency responsible for budget formulation—raised concerns about methods the Corps uses to rank the importance of individual construction projects. The budget narrative states that the Corps should "only proceed with those new projects that provide a very high net economic or environmental return to society relative to their cost," and calls for independent review as an effective oversight method. The budget also calls for full funding—$33 million annually—of the Environmental Management Program, which studies and monitors portions of the Upper Mississippi River; in the past, EMP has been funded annually up to the $20 million level. The 2004 budget also recognizes the EMP as one of eight projects considered to be "highest priorities."

2. Congress has shaped legislative proposals. The prescriptions under consideration include requiring independent review of any project costing more than $25 million, to changing the portion of local funds required to match federal funds on a given project, to ensuring that a project's environmental impacts are adequately mitigated.

3. A bipartisan congressional task force is watching. The Upper Mississippi River Basin Task Force monitors legislative efforts to ensure they are beneficial to the Upper Mississippi. It is co-chaired by Jim Leach (R-IA), Jerry Costello (D-IL), Ron Kind (D-WI), and Gil Gutknecht (R-MN). Several task force members now advocate permanent measures to provide better oversight of the Corps.

4. Local, regional, and national advocacy groups have organized. The Corps Reform Network is a coalition of nearly 100 groups that was formed out of citizen frustration with the destruction caused by Corps projects to rivers and coastal areas. The Network is united by the same concerns that inform other Corps Reform efforts:

mismanagement and damage to valuable aquatic resources;
questionable economic justification and waste of taxpayer dollars; and
dubious decision-making that is too often driven by political considerations.

The Network focuses on changing the Corps' operating procedures and stopping or redirecting ill-conceived projects from causing further resource damage or fiscal waste.

Lest it be perceived as a new issue of the 21st century, it is worth noting that the administrations of presidents Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan also tangled with Congress over possible reforms to the Corps of Engineers' operations, and a round of key reforms were passed in 1986. Then, as now, the politically sensitive question of funding local projects in congressional members' districts was central. But Corps Reform has taken on new life as these political issues have become more firmly linked to the dual agendas of bureaucratic reform versus water resources management, protection, and restoration.

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