If no other good comes out of the Katrina disaster, it could be
the realization by Congress and the administration of the need to
overhaul the way they prioritize and rank the nation’s civil works
projects. The suffering of the people of New Orleans and environs
is a vivid, if painful, illustration of the necessity of targeting
high-risk threats and high-value projects while abandoning the
traditional political allocation of precious resources. As the
Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) begins to move through
Congress, now is the time to consider a new approach that applies
the venerable principle of war — concentration — to the Army
Corps of Engineers and its civil works budget.
The recent announcements by the Bush administration that the
cost of rebuilding New Orleans’ levees to federal standards had
almost tripled to $10 billion, followed by a subsequent reduction
in the cost estimate to $7.6 billion, only intensified the ongoing
orgy of recriminations, second guessing, and general dismay over
the failure of that levee system in the first place.
Originally, Donald E. Powell, the administration’s rebuilding
coordinator, had indicated that some areas may be left without
protection of levees meeting the requirements of the national flood
insurance program. This would have made it more difficult for
developers to take on the risk of rebuilding in those locales.
According to the Washington Post, Mr. Powell said these
same areas would not be subject to catastrophic flooding, but
“there might be some ‘manageable’ flooding.” Mr. Powell believed
that the matter of the $6 billion shortfall was “an insurance
issue, and not necessarily a safety issue.” No doubt, the numbers
will continue to bounce around as the project moves forward.
Mr. Powell’s statements were regrettable but understandable. He
was trying to take a relative risk or prioritization approach to
the deployment of limited dollars. Powell had broken the parishes
of New Orleans into 10 areas and was presenting state and local
officials with comparisons and choices such as these:
Three sections of Plaquemines Parish contain less than 2 percent
of the area’s population, but cost almost $2.5 to $2.9 billion to
build certified levees. However, the Algiers area, which contains
13 percent of the region’s population, costs $129 million. Powell
is asking the locals to help him make some tough calls in terms of
who gets what.
The administration has, most recently, committed another $2.5
billion for levee work which will, according to the Post,
ensure protection for 98 percent of the population in the
four-parish region of New Orleans to meet flood insurance standards
and protect against the “100-year flood.” However, it is unclear
how much Louisiana must contribute. Moreover, still unresolved is
the fate of lower Plaquemines Parish, a rural area with only 1,500
residents for whom levee improvements would now cost $1.6
billion.
To protect Plaquemines Parish, a long piece of land extending 60
miles southeast of New Orleans into the Gulf, would cost well over
a million dollars for every person in the area. With almost 20
square miles of Louisiana coast eroding away every year, many parts
of this parish are now under water.
NEVERTHELESS, POLITICIANS HATE these kinds of trade-offs. No where
is this truer than in the manner in which Congress authorizes and
appropriates funding for projects for the civil works program of
the Army Corps of Engineers.
On the budget or appropriations side, the White House, OMB, and
the Secretary of the Army develop the President’s budget priorities
which are, in turn, subject to change or supplementation by
congressional committees. Because the Corps’ total civil works
budget has been reduced over recent decades, in terms of real
dollars, and because a higher percentage of it goes to funding
operations and maintenance activities, congressional add-ons put
additional strain on already limited resources.
Of course, executive branch priorities are not infallible. But
they are developed from a national perspective. And OMB, usually a
constructive player in these matters, does look to optimize net
economic benefits, which is at least an intellectually defensible
basis for prioritization if not the only one.
“Concentration” is the overarching principle of war. It has been
characterized as the concentration of superior forces and the
strict economy of forces assigned to secondary missions. This
venerable maxim of military strategy may provide a useful analogy
for prioritizing the nation’s infrastructure investments as they
relate to the work of the Army Corps of Engineers, especially in
the area of flood protection, navigation, and even environmental
restoration.
It’s time for Congress, the administration, and the Corps to
apply this principle for the benefit of citizens and the taxpayers
they serve by focusing, or concentrating, substantial but limited
resources only on those essential undertakings that protect the
lives and properties of Americans most at risk, or where there are
opportunities for restoration of outstanding or critical
environmental or natural resources, say, coastal wetlands in
Louisiana.
Fortunately, there is a means at hand for implementing this
fundamental reform in policy and practice: the Feingold-McCain
bill. No, not McCain-Feingold. The bill in question has nothing to
do with campaign finance, climate change, or any boneheaded move to
“censure” the President.
The Water Resources Planning and Modernization Act of 2006 (S.
2288), co-sponsored by Senators Feingold and McCain, as a possible
amendment to WRDA, is an imperfect vehicle for changing the way
Congress handles Corps business. But we should not let the perfect
become the enemy of the possible. As the current New Orleans
predicament reveals, there is too much at stake to hold out for
some unachievable Platonic notion of Corps reform.
S. 2288 establishes national priorities for the Corps in terms
of navigation, flood control, and ecosystem restoration. It revives
the Water Resources Council (WRC) made up of cabinet secretaries
from several agencies as well as adding to it the Secretaries of
the Army and Homeland Security as well as the Chairman of the White
House Council on Environmental Quality.
Since the zeroing out of the WRC process and budget in the
1980s, there has been little, if any, cross-department or
interagency coordination on key water issues.
THE WRC WOULD, basically, provide an assessment of the nation’s
vulnerability to floods and storms, including the relative risks by
region, and provide recommendations for improving flood damage
reduction programs. In conjunction with the National Academy of
Sciences, it would also revise the federal guidelines on water
projects to improve project analysis of such things as benefits and
costs (including non-economic ones) which have been the subject of
controversy for some time now.
Most importantly, the WRC would submit to Congress a report
prioritizing Corps water resources projects by type. While not a
legally actionable list, such as happens with military base
closures, it would at least put Congress on notice as to what the
top priorities are from a national perspective. It would
provide a transparent, open process that sets a standard by which
to evaluate congressional action over time.
The circumstances of the Louisiana coast and New Orleans, in
particular, illustrate how limited federal dollars have been
squandered on projects of limited usefulness and cost effectiveness
— at the expense of needed levee protection. The economic, social,
and environmental costs of the $748 million Industrial Canal Lock
Replacement in New Orleans dwarfed any of the claimed benefits of
this proposed project. Providing a longer, wider, and deeper lock
is of questionable value because barge traffic in the canal has
decreased 50% since 1988. The Corps launched construction in 2000
and Congress has already appropriated more than $70 million for
this project.
Whenever a Corps authorization or appropriations bill is moving
through Congress, it is festooned with, literally, hundreds of such
projects and studies, driven largely by parochial political
interests, rather than pressing national priorities in terms of
human health and safety, economics, or environmental protection.
Call it the Canal-to-Nowhere syndrome.
Another feature of the bill is a requirement for independent
review by panels of outside experts for Corp projects that are over
$25 million; are challenged by a governor of a state in which the
project is located; or are determined by the Secretary of the Army
to be “controversial” as to impacts, costs, and benefits —
economic and environmental.
This provision of the legislation will, no doubt, give the Corps
some heartburn since it might be construed as duplicative to the
recently instituted peer-review process it has established for
major projects. Hopefully, the senatorial sponsors will accommodate
these concerns by entertaining amendments, for instance, to raise
the dollar threshold; harmonize, to the extent possible, the bill
with current best practices; and provide greater objectivity for
projects deemed to be controversial.
With reasonable adjustments the Corps might come to view these
independent panels as legitimizing technical bodies which could
dampen controversy over the long haul while bolstering its
credibility with the public.
Given congressional prerogatives in asserting control over the
Corps budget, why would Congress pass this legislation in the first
place? That, as they say, is a political question. Hopefully, a
dynamic political environment, one in which bridges to nowhere and
other diversions from pressing national priorities are increasingly
criticized by constituencies on the left and the right, will
engender a coalition for reform of critical civil works
funding.
G. Tracy Mehan, III, was assistant administrator for
water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in President
Bush’s first term. He is presently a Principal with the Cadmus
Group, Inc., an environmental consulting firm in Arlington,
Virginia. The views expressed here are entirely his
own.
