This week
the Obama Administration hosted their first listening session on the 2014 Water
Resources Reform and Development Act to solicit ideas on how to implement the
Water Resources Reform and Development Act signed into law last June.
The Act is
huge and sweeping and the Administration is hosting four sessions that focus on
different parts of the bill. This week,
we talked about deauthorization and project planning. I came prepared
to talk about the chosen topics. But
a contingent of farmers had something else in mind.
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| Photo by Olivia Dorothy |
Within the
first minute a farmer from Illinois called on the Corps to fund the Navigation
Ecosystem Sustainability Program…
Totally off topic. Unfortunately
the Illinois farmer wasn't alone. The
session was crashed by a team of pro-NESP cheerleaders. Ugh!
What’s even
more troubling is that some of the Team NESP cheerleaders actually had some
articulate suggestions for the deauthorization guidance like “ensuring
non-federal sponsors approve the project deauthorization.”
I’m sorry,
but nothing would ever be deauthorized if every single local interest group had
the power to approve or deny a Corps project. It’s bad enough local interests can pressure
the Corps to reprogram
funds to keep projects like NESP walking dead.
But it is
not Congress's intent to make deauthorization harder. The 2014 Act requires the Corps to produce a
list of projects that total $18 billion for deauthorization. But there is no way
a penny will be deauthorized if local sponsors have the power to deny
it.
Hopefully,
the Administration will see through this and take a heavy hand to downsize the
$60 billion plus list of unfunded Corps projects. And I hope NESP will be taken out with the
other dead ones.
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