How to Kill Zombies: Deauthorization

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.

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.

The Zombie Project

This month, the Rock Island District of the Corps of Engineers announced that it reprogrammed $50,000 to bring Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program (NESP) back from the dead. 

The majority of environmental and conservation groups in the Mississippi Basin oppose this project because NESP handcuffs ecosystem restoration funding to expensive, unnecessary, and environmentally damaging navigation infrastructure spending.  By handcuffing ecosystem restoration to navigation infrastructure, it puts the restoration funding at greater risk.  And it prevents managers from addressing a main cause of environmental degradation in the Upper Mississippi River:  the navigation infrastructure itself.  Congress actually stopped funding for the program in 2011 because the navigation projects could never be economically justified by the Corps. 

Thankfully, the four year lifespan of NESP wasn't enough to fully implement the project by 2011.  If it had been fully implemented, important ecosystem restoration spending would have dried up in 2011 also.  Fortunately, the successful Upper Mississippi River Restoration Program, which NESP was planning to replace, remains intact and funded today.

Since Congress last funded NESP in fiscal year 2010 it is slated for deauthorization consideration starting in fiscal year 2015 (according to a 2007 law passed by Congress).  So, the Rock Island District is throwing a pittance at the program this year in hopes of restarting the deauthorization clock. 

 

So, what will the $50,000 accomplish?  The Corps’ program manager says the funds will be used “to develop a plan to update the construction cost estimates.”  Not actual update any part of the project, just plan to update it.

This is an annoying strategy the Corps practices nationally to keep bad programs on life support.  Throw a penny in the account, don’t do any real work, and keep these zombie programs running around terrorizing those of us trying to protect and restore rivers around the country.

The silver lining is that the Corps may not be allowed to keep their zombie projects much longer.  The President signed a new law this year that revamps the 2007 deauthorization process.  The law intends to clear the Corps’ more than $60 billion backlog of projects that are minimally funded, lack local support, and/or are no longer feasible.

With the new law, the public will be given opportunities to comment on the list of projects for deauthorization, and the Nicollet Island Coalition will be looking forward to taking out these zombie projects.