Testimony of Scott Faber
Senior Director for Public Policy American Rivers
Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure
Environment and Public Works Committee
May 16, 2000

Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Scott Faber and I am Senior Director for Public Policy for American Rivers, a national river conservation organization.

Corps of Engineers projects have produced significant benefits for the nation, including many navigation and flood control projects, and the Corps has played an indispensable role in the repair of many of the nation's environmentally degraded waterways. Indeed, scientists warn that many of the nation's most storied waterways - including the Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Sacramento, Columbia and Snake rivers - will increasingly lose the ability to support river wildlife unless Corps habitat restoration efforts are accelerated. It has become increasingly clear that the Corps is only agency with the legal jurisdiction and requisite expertise to repair many of our nationally significant rivers and estuaries.

We recognize that the Corps must continue to construct navigation and flood control projects which are economically justified, environmentally sound, and serve the nation's interest. However, many Corps projects continue to be economically suspect, environmentally unacceptable, and serve primarily private interests. The reasons are two- fold: the Corps' outdated methodology for predicting the benefits and costs of proposed projects, and a hopelessly politicized decision-making process.

The evidence supporting the need for reform is overwhelming.

Many Corps flood control and navigation projects have failed to produce predicted benefits, or have resulted in unacceptably high environmental costs. Some Corps planners have bent the rules of project planning to support economically questionable projects, and the current absence of meaningful oversight has created an atmosphere conducive to this kind of abuse. Many projects are built to serve the needs of a handful of special interests, and the Corps frequently treats local cost-sharing partners - rather than the American people - as their clients. Despite a growing backlog of authorized projects, an increasing number of Corps projects primarily benefit private interests -- including many projects which lie outside the Corps' traditional missions of flood control, navigation and restoration. In some cases, the Corps has simply failed to mitigate for the environmental impacts of levees, dams and channels, or mitigation projects have failed to produce promised benefits. Some flood control and navigation projects are constructed even when there is ample evidence that project impacts cannot be cost-effectively or successfully mitigated.

Congress must act now to ensure that future Corps projects are economically justified, environmentally sound, and serve the national interest. ~ particular, Congress should include reforms in the Water Resources Development Act of 2000 which modernize the agency's measurement of benefits and costs, require independent review of significant or controversial projects, expand the input of local stakeholders, prioritize Corps spending, and require adequate mitigation for Corps projects. We will not support, and will urge the President to veto, water resources legislation which fails to reform the Corps.

1) Require Modern Estimates of Benefits and Costs

Congress should direct the Corps to reform the agency's feasibility study process to require that Corps projects have primarily public, rather than private benefits, and should include reforms which reflect the uncertainty of Corps benefit-cost calculations.

The nation should no longer invest public resources simply because the benefits of a proposed project, to whomever those benefits may accrue, exceed project costs. We should instead replace this New Deal-era formulation which a system which requires that future projects produce primarily public benefits - including the public benefits of healthy rivers -- and apply this system to both proposed and previously authorized projects. Congress should direct the Corps to develop new tools to better predict the benefits and costs of proposed projects. For example, Congress should direct the Corps to measure the extent to which goods shipped by barge would be shipped by other means and to other destinations as transportation costs change. Congress should also require that project benefits be twice as great as project costs to reflect the Corps' inability to accurately predict likely benefits and costs.

Many completed projects have failed to produce promised benefits, including many segments of the Inland Waterway System. Unlike the Mississippi, Ohio and Illinois rivers, many segments of the Inland Waterway System have never supported as many barges as predicted, including the Missouri, Alabama-Coosa, Atlantic-Intracoastal, Tennessee-Tombigbee, Allegheny, Pearl, Willamette, Apalachicola, Kaskaskia, Kentucky, White, and Red rivers. Consequently, 18 of the Inland Waterway System's 29 segments move less than three percent of the nation's barge traffic while consuming more than 30 percent of the system's Operations and Maintenance costs.

Similarly, the costs of many Corps projects are frequently greater than forecast. In retrospect, many Corps projects - though economically justified on paper - have not proved to be economically justified in reality. Congress should direct the Corps to develop new tools to predict project benefits and costs and, to address this uncertainty, require that project benefits be twice as great as project costs. Congress should apply this requirement to previously authorized projects as well as future projects. Steps should be taken to better monitor the performance of completed projects to ensure that the Corps' benefit-cost calculations are reasonably accurate, and a new process should be created to regularly review and update project operations to reflect changed conditions and new information.

2) Require Independent Review, Greater Local Input and Civilian Oversight

Congress must take steps to protect the integrity of the Corps' decision-making process. There is mounting evidence that Corps planners have bent the rules of project planning to support economically questionable, environmentally unsound projects. There are many reasons for this abuse: self-preservation; the elimination of technical review by the Corps' review branch; the absence of meaningful oversight by Congress and the Assistant Secretary of the Army; and, growing pressure from cost-sharing partners and other Corps constituents.

As we have seen, there is evidence of abuse of the Corps's decision-making process by the Rock Island District - a string of e-mails, internal memos and affidavits which show that the Corps' military and civilian leaders urged economists to exaggerate expected demand for barges to justify the construction of new locks. Top Corps officials ordered the Rock Island study team "to develop evidence or data to support a defensible set of . . . projects." One memo candidly declared that if the economics did not "capture the need for navigation improvements, then we have to find some other way to do it."

But there are other examples of abuse and inaccuracies as well.

A $311 million proposal to deepen the Delaware River incorrectly presumes that oil refineries will dee?en their approach channels to take advantage of the deepening project. Indeed, the Corps knowingly ignored evidence that some refineries will not deepen these approach channels. A $230 million proposal to deepen Savannah Harbor is based upon predictions of unprecedented and unlikely demand for the port, estimates which ignore ongoing consolidation in the deep draft shipping industry. Corps planners have routinely underestimated the long-term maintenance costs of beach replenishment proj ects. And, as we have seen in the case of Devil's Lake, this abuse of agency planning rules is not limited to the Corps' military leadership or the agency's civilian planners.

Unless the Corps' decision-making process is reformed, members of Congress and the public will have no guarantee that projects are economically justified or that a project's environmental impacts have been adequately assessed and mitigated. In order to ensure that Corps studies are based on sound science, Congress should require independent review for projects whose total costs exceed $25 million, or projects which are considered controversial by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Independent review of large Corps projects would have several benefits: independent review would detect abuses or mistakes, discourage abuses, and empower Corps planners being pressured to bend the rules by Corps cost-sharing partners and other constituents. Independent review would also inject new ideas into the Corps' planning process.

We do not propose that Corps feasibility studies continue endlessly and fail to recommend projects, as was the case during the 1 970s. We believe independent review could be blended seamlessly into the feasibility study phase and would not increase the length or the cost of feasibility studies.

We also urge Congress to balance the influence of cost-sharing partners by creating a stakeholder advisory group, subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, to collect the input of local interests and to seek consensus regarding project objectives and design.

Congress should create a commission, as proposed by Senator Daschle in S. 2309, to assess the civil works functions of the Corps, including the quality of the Corps' analysis, whether the Corps' management structure should be changed, compliance with environmental laws, and whether any civil works functions should be transferred from the Department of the Army to a civilian agency or privatized.

Finally, we urge you to work with the Clinton Administration to quickly restore civilian oversight of the Corps, unessential tenet of our system of government. The absence of meaningful civilian oversight offends the Constitution, violates federal law, and has contributed to an environment where the abuse of Corps rules has flourished. We strongly oppose Sec. 3102 of the Agriculture Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2001, which is designed to frustrate these important reforms.

3) Require Adequate Mitigation

In some cases, the Corps has failed to mitigate for the environmental impacts of levees and dams, or mitigation has not produced expected benefits. For example, the Vicksburg District of the Corps has a backlog of more than 30,00 acres of promised mitigation which has not been completed. In addition, mitigation for Corps projects often replaces a fraction of the habitat destroyed.

Congress should require that the Corps meet the same habitat mitigation standards as must be met by private developers. In particular, Congress should require the Corps to concurrently replace an acre of habitat for each acre of habitat impacted by a project, and should design projects to reflect the contemporary understanding of aquatic ecosystems. Funding for project construction and mitigation should be included in a single construction appropriation to ensure that mitigation is completed.

In addition, we believe the Secretary should not recommend a project when the impacts of a proposed project cannot be cost-effectively or successfully mitigated. In the past, the Corps would attempt to mitigate for projects regardless of cost or the likelihood of success. Efforts to mitigate for the construction of four dams on the Lower Snake River is an example of this approach - though we have spent more than $3 billion on mitigation, all runs of Snake River salmon are considered endangered by the federal government. This has been neither cost-effective nor successful. We propose that an expanded Environmental Advisory Board evaluate projects in the reconnaissance phase to determine whether the project is likely to have environmental impacts which cannot be cost-effectively or successfully mitigated.

4) Meet National Priorities

In light of the backlog of authorized projects, Congress should create new criteria to ensure that future Corps projects reflect the nation's highest priority water resources needs.

Many authorized projects have questionable economic benefits and unacceptably high environmental costs. I have already mentioned several new tests that could be applied to proposed projects as well as currently authorized projects: Congress should require that project benefits be twice as great as project costs, ensure the Corps adequately mitigates for projects, and prohibit the construction of projects when expected impacts cannot be cost-effectively or successfully mitigated. Congress should expand the scope of the current Reauthorization statute to eliminate projects which do not satisfy these tests as well projects with questionable economic benefits, and projects which could be constructed by private interests.

Other steps should be taken to address the backlog and expand the reach of scarce funds. For example, Congress should increase the local contribution required for structural flood control projects, beach replenishment projects, and navigation improvements, and should apply those cost-sharing reforms to proposed and previously authorized projects. In particular, Congress should require states to share part of the cost of navigation projects.

To help guide appropriators, Congress should direct the Corps to develop, in collaboration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a flood damage reduction priority list which recognizes the importance of protecting people and public infrastructure. Though FEMA has identified the location of the nation's most repeatedly flooded structures, the Corps does not use this information to guide flood control spending. Indeed, currently proposed Corps flood control projects protect few of the nation's most frequently flooded homes and businesses.

Clearly, many projects should be Reauthorized. In general, we propose that the Congress apply new criteria to authorized and proposed projects to identify those projects which should no longer receive federal support. However, we believe several projects merit special attention, including environmental infrastructure projects, municipal water supply projects and agricultural irrigation projects. In particular, Congress should Reauthorize irrigation and navigation projects slated for Arkansas' White River.

Finally, the Congress should declare a moratorium on new beach replenishment projects until the Corps completes a National Shoreline Study, and should carefully review beach replenishment projects slated for New Jersey and Long Island. Experts predict that a recent authorization to provide 100-foot wide beaches along all 127 miles of New Jersey's sea coast will cost more than $9 billion over the next 50 years.

5) Expand the Corps' Restoration Mission

As I have already mentioned, many Corps flood control and navigation projects have had devastating impacts on the nation's aquatic resources. Scientists have linked dams, levees and channel training structures to the extinction of scores of freshwater species, and the likely extinction of hundreds more freshwater species during the next century. Indeed, North America's freshwater species are disappearing as quickly as tropical rainforest species and five times faster animals that live on land. To date, 17 freshwater fish species are extinct, and one in ten of North America's mussel species are extinct. Two-thirds of North America's remaining mussels and one-third of North America's amphibians are imperiled.

Corps projects are a major contributor to the loss of our freshwater biodiversity. More importantly, the Corps is, in many cases, the only agency with the legal jurisdiction and engineering expertise capable of repairing these damaged waterways. For example, the Corps is frequently the only state or federal agency which can restore wildlife habitat along segments of the 11,000-mile Inland Waterway System. The simple fact of the matter is that the biological future of many of the nation's most nationally significant waterways - including the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Columbia, Snake, Rio Grande, Sacramento rivers -- depends solely upon the restoration skills of the same agency which has placed their biological future in peril.

Just as Congress must ensure that flood control and navigation projects reflect sound science, Congress must also ensure that the Corps' restoration and mitigation projects reflect the state-of-the-art. We urge you to apply the same reforms I have already mentioned to the Corps' restoration program - independent review, greater local input, better estimates of cost-effectiveness, and adequate economic mitigation for the economic impacts of proposed restoration projects. These reforms will ensure that restoration and mitigation projects are cost-effective, scientifically sound, and meet broad ecological goals.

Other steps can be taken to improve the Corps' restoration mission. In particular, Congress should allow the Corps to share the cost of land acquisition for restoration and mitigation projects. Currently, project sponsors are required to provide all lands, easements and rights-of-way. In addition, Congress should allow the local-share to be satisfied by in-kind contributions.

6) Restore the Rivers of Lewis and Clark

We also urge the Congress to act now restore the rivers of Lewis and Clark by boosting restoration efforts for the Missouri River by $250 million, as has been proposed by Senator Bond; creating a $200 million Ohio River restoration program; and creating a $175 million Lower Columbia River Estuary restoration program. In next few years, millions of Americans will retrace the steps of Lewis and Clark. But, America's most famous explorers would not recognize these arteries of the continent if they were to return today. Corps flood control and navigation projects have so altered these rivers that many of the wildlife species they encountered are now in jeopardy of extinction. You have an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to repair these damaged waterways that must not be squandered.

Army engineers forced the broad, slow-flowing Lower Missouri River into a deep, faster canal, eliminating virtually all of the river's islands, sandbars and side channels - the places river wildlife need in order to survive. The river's floodplain was cleared and cut off by a wall of public and private levees. Consequently, more than 30 species have been placed on state and federal watch lists and more than 100 species are considered rare in some places. One species of sturgeon which has resided in the Missouri for more than 100 million years has been nearly eliminated by Corps alterations implemented in the last 50 years. The Missouri River Valley Improvement Act sponsored by Senators Bond, Daschle, Kerrey,Johnson and Brownback would give wildlife a fighting chance by expanding the Missouri River Fish and Wildlife Mitigation Project and the Missouri River Enhancement Program, assessing opportunities for restoration along reservoirs in the Dakotas and Montana. and bv establishing a long-term monitoring program to measure success.

~Dams constructed on the Ohio River to aid commercial navigation inundated spawning habitat for popular sportfish like bass and undermined the river's floodplain forests and wetlands. Legislation that is being developed by Senator McConnell would help meet the needs of river wildlife by authorizing the Corps to restore wildlife habitat, including spawning grounds, side channels, and floodplain forests and wetlands

Finally, several House members have proposed the creation of a program to restore the Lower Columbia River's estuary, where Corps navigation and flood control projects have contributed to lethal conditions for young salmon preparing for life in the ocean. The river's estuary serves a critical role in the survival of salmon, providing refuge and nutrients while juvenile salmon change physiologically from a freshwater to a saltwater organism. Scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service have concluded that estuary restoration is one of the most promising means of restoring Columbia and Snake salmon runs. Although estuary restoration does not reduce the need to remove four dams from the Lower Snake River, estuary restoration must be a central component of our salmon recovery strategy.

Conclusion

Congress must act quickly and decisively to restore credibility to the Corps' civil works program. Certainly, this committee should use its oversight powers to investigate abuse of the Corps' decision-making process, including potential abuses by the Clinton Administration. But, the committee should also recognize that the absence of meaningful review, outdated methods of predicting benefits and costs, and studies designed to meet the needs of proj ect sponsors rather than the nation have created an environment where abuse has been able to flourish and will continue to flourish. We urge you to implement important, long-overdue reforms of the Corps of Engineers, including independent review, greater local input, modern estimates and benefits and costs, and adequate mitigation for project impacts.