Garret Graves: “Remove Army Corps of Engineers from Comite River Diversion project”
BATON ROUGE – U.S. Rep. Garret Graves suggested how the Comite River Diversion Canal project could more quickly come to fruition.
“Take it away from the Army Corp of Engineers (COE),” the 6th Congressional District said in an address Monday at the weekly luncheon of the Baton Rouge Press Club.
The freshman GOP Congressman from Baton Rouge believes the project would much faster if the Amite River Basin Commission and the state Department and Transportation would oversee the work.
Aside from Washington bureaucracy, Graves could not pinpoint why the COE has made very little progress on the project.
The joint federal-state-local project originally carried a price tag of $163 million and was expected to take six years to complete when officials broke ground for the project in 2003.
In 2015, the project remains in the planning. The cost has soared above the $200 million mark.
“The federal government spends more money on FEMA claims than it would cost to complete this project,” he said.