Pouring lobbyists on troubled waters

The Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) seems like the kind of thing that would sail through Congress. On nearly every one of the bill’s 300-plus pages is a project, from levee construction to beach restoration to tree pruning around lakes, that a lawmaker could crow about back home.      

But the bill has been sunk in past years by a controversy over fudged budget numbers for a $1.8 billion lock-improvement project on the Upper Mississippi and wariness among Republican leaders that passing the bill would lead to more unwelcome comparisons to drunken sailors.

{mosads}Environmental and budget watchdog groups also have fought against the measure. The bill authorizes construction projects undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Given the bill’s largess, however, it also has attracted a wide circle of supporters both on and off Capitol Hill who are determined to push the mighty measure to the president’s desk this year.

The House already has passed a $15 billion version. The Senate is expected to vote on the bill this week.

Howard Marlowe, a lobbyist who built his practice around securing money for beach-restoration projects, said the reauthorization bill, more than five years overdue, has a good chance of passing.

It enjoys “the very, very strong” support of key committee chairmen and -women. “That is making a difference,” he said.

Marlowe’s firm lobbies for the American Beach Restoration and Shore Preservation Association, one of dozens of groups that signed a recent letter to the Senate urging WRDA’s passage.

The bill provides “innumerable” economic and recreational benefits, the letter stated. Other backers include the Corn
Growers of American, a powerful lobby representing corn farmers who believe the lock-improvement measure would make it easier to ship their product; the American Association of Port Authorities; Dredging Contractors of America; and several local carpenters groups whose members could see the benefit of additional work if the bill is passed.

Senate staff aides worked to rewrite a provision that had ballooned the bill’s score to over $31 billion, more than twice the $15 billion measure the House already has adopted. That language, which would grant unusual powers to the committees of jurisdiction to authorize recommendations for restoring New Orleans and other Louisiana coastal areas, was rewritten to negate the high budget score.

The total price was expected to come in at less than the House measure. But there are plenty of obstacles supporters will have to steer around before the bill becomes law. The White House, for example, has complained about the bill’s cost.
Environmental groups continue to oppose some of the measure’s provisions, including the Upper Mississippi lock-improvement project.

Melissa Samet, senior director of water resources at American Rivers, called the lock-improvement project a waste of money.
Its benefits are based on projections of an increase in barge traffic, and the cost of delays on moving corn downriver and to foreign markets.

Critics note that traffic has not increased in recent decades, and say more corn is likely to stay in the United States to be turned into ethanol.

“There is no economic justification for expanding the locks. There hasn’t been for a long time and there still isn’t,” Samet said.  

Her group would rather see the Corps spend its finite resources on efforts to restore habitats to their natural state.

American Rivers is supporting an amendment from Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) to require the Corps to factor into cost projections estimated effects of global warming, Samet said.

Another issue has sparked complaints from the groups that support the measure most.

Worth Hager, president of the National Waterways Conference, an umbrella group, said her members have “grave concerns” about language in the Senate bill that calls for an additional independent review of certain projects approved by the Corps of Engineers.

Supporters say the review is a necessary defense against the Corps’s habit of backing projects that end up costing more than they save.

“The Corps is not a real stickler when it comes to the economics of a project,” said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, one of the Corps’s most vocal critics.

Ellis pointed to a project to dredge a channel to New Iberia, designed to make the area more attractive commercially, that yields only $1.03 in benefits for every $1 it costs, Ellis said.   And that small benefit could come at the expense of a Texas port that services business for deep-water oil drilling, which is what Louisiana is trying to attract, Ellis said.

Ellis said he supports an independent panel to help break what he calls “the symbiotic relationship” between the Corps and Congress — one provides the justification, the other the money.

But Hager and Marlowe said projects the Corps approves have gone through years of extensive review, and the addition of an independent review at the end of the process could delay necessary projects even further.

People who claim the projects are wasteful and ill considered “are not aware of the process these projects go through before authorization,” Hager said. “It takes years to establish any federal interest in getting [the projects] done.”

Marlowe said descriptions of WRDA as a pork-barrel bill, a frequent charge, are a “bad rap.”

Both said that they would be open to an independent analysis of projects, but that the review should come as the Corps performs its own reviews, not afterward.

Marlowe thinks the Corps is insufficiently funded and lacks the resources and expertise to do certain sophisticated cost-benefit analyses.

One reason Congress hasn’t seemed to be in a rush to settle some of these issues is there already are more projects than money. Ellis pointed to a $58 billion backlog of authorized projects awaiting money.

The Corps gets about $2 billion in funding for construction projects. The authorization bill won’t raise that number — only appropriators can — but it will increase the number of hands reaching into the pot.