Dam Outrage: The Story of the Army Engineers

THE Atlantic

FOUNDED IN 1857

The St. Croix River, one of the few remaining wild rivers in the nation, forms a stretch ol the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota before it runs into the Mississippi below Minneapolis. Not long ago, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin discovered that the Army Corps of Engineers was considering the construction of a hundred-foothigh dam on the St. Croix. At the same time, Nelson and Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota were trying to win legislation that would preserve the river in its natural state. Nelson took the unusual step of going before a congressional committee to oppose a Corps project in his own state. “The Corps of Engineers,” he said, ‘ is like that maivelous little creature, the beaver, whose instinct tells him every fall to build a dam wherever he finds a trickle of water. But at least he has a purpose—to stoie up some iood underwater and create a livable habitat for the long winter. Like the Corps, this little animal frequently builds dams he doesn’t need, but at least he doesn’t ask the taxpayer to foot the bill.”

Few politicians publicly criticize the Corps, because almost all of them want something from it at some point—a dam, a harbor, a flood-control project. A combination of Corps diplomacy and congressional mutuality keeps most of the politicians content, and quiet. The overwhelming majority of Corps projects arc attractive federal bonuses. given free of charge to communities—some local contributions may be involved in small Hoodcon trol or municipal-water-supply projects—and therefore they are highly prized. “They take care of all of the states,” said one Senate aide, “if there’s water in a faucet in one of them, they’ll go in there and build a dam.”

There is no question that the civil works program of the Army Corps of Engineers, viewed over its long history, has benefited the country. It has made waterways navigable and provided hydroelectric power and flood control. Communities to which it has brought help have been genuinely grateful. Now, however, it is a prime example of a bureaucracy that is outliving its rationale, and that is what is getting it into trouble. As the Corps, impelled by bureaucratic momentum and political accommodation, has gone about its damming and dredging and “straightening” of rivers and streams, it has brought down upon itself the wrath of more and more people disturbed about the effects on the environment. A secret poll taken by the White House last year showed environmental concerns to be second only to Vietnam in the public mind. This rather sudden general awareness of the science of ecology—the interrelationships between organisms and their environment—has brought projects which disturb the environment and the ecology, as Corps projects do, under unprecedented attack. The Corps’ philosophy, on the other hand, was recently expressed in a speech by its chief, Lieutenant General F. J. Clarke. “With our country growing the way it is,” he said, “we cannot simply sit back and let nature take its course.”

by Elizabeth B. Drew

Criticism of the Corps and what its programs are all about is not based solely on environmental issues. The broader question, given the claims on our national resources, is whether it makes sense to continue to wink at traditional public: works programs, and the self-serving politics which sustain them. The nation is now committed, for example, to making Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Fort Worth, Texas, into seaports, although each is about 400 miles from the sea, at costs ol at least $1.2 billion and billion respectively. There are other questions that might be raised at this point, such as whether subsidizing the barge industry should be a national priority; or whether eve want to continue to dredge and fill estuaries and build flood-control projects for the benefit of real estate developers and wealthy farmers. The Army Corps of Engineers and its work have been a very important force in American life, with few questions asked. Yet it is not fair simply to castigate the Corps, for the politicians have made the decisions and the public has gone along. General Clarke had a point when he said that the Corps is being put “in the unhappy and, I can’t help feeling, rather unfair position of being blamed for presenting a bill by people who have forgotten that they ate the dinner.”

The Corps is part of a growing hodgepodge of federal bureaucracies and programs that work at cross-purposes. The Department of Agriculture drains wetlands while the Department of Interior tries to preserve them. The Corps dams wild rivers while the Department of Interior tries to save them. The Corps and the Bureau of Reclamation in Interior provide farmlands for crops which farmers are paid not to produce. The government spent $77 million to build the Glen Elder Dam in Kansas, a Bureau of Reclamation project which provided land to produce feed grains, for which the government pays out hundreds of millions of dollars a year to retire. The Tennessee Valley Authority is also still building dams, and it does strip-mining.

But of these water programs, the Corps’ is by far the largest. Each year Congress gives it more than a billion dollars, and each year’s budget represents commitments to large spending in the future. In a deliberate effort to spread the money around, new projects are begun and ones already under way are permitted to take longer to complete, in the end driving up the costs of all of them.

The annual Public Works appropriations bill provides money for, among others, the Panama Canal, the Water Pollution Control Administration and the Bureau of Reclamation in the Interior Department, and various public power administrations, as well as the Corps of Engineers. This year it came to $2.5 billion, of which the Corps received $1.1 billion. The Corps is now at work on 275 projects. The total future cost of these will be $13.5 billion, not accounting for the customary price increases. Another 452 projects have been authorized by Congress, but have not yet been started. The Corps says that the total cost of these would be another $10 billion, clearly an underestimation of some magnitude. For every project to which the country is already committed, the Corps, the politicians, and the local interests who stand to gain have many, many more in mind.

“Destiny. ..”

The Corps’ official history traces its beginnings to a colonel who dug trenches “in the darkness of the morning” during the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the subsequent orders of President Washington to establish a corps of military engineers and a school to train them. In 1802, the Corps was established, and West Point was designated to provide its members. The history of the Corps is interwoven with that of the country and its frontier ethic. It is a very proud agency. “They led the way,” its history says, “in exploring the great West. They were the pathfinders sent out by a determined government at Washington. They guided, surveyed, mapped, and fought Indians and nature across the continent. . . . They made surveys for work on the early canals and railroads. They extended the National Road from Cumberland to the Ohio and beyond. They made the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi safe for navigation in the Middle West. They opened up harbors for steamships on the Great Lakes.” After the war with Mexico, in which “the part played by the Army Engineer officers was impressive . . . the last segment of the great Western Empire was soon annexed. These things were all accomplished by the application of America’s greatest power. That is the power of Engineering Character, Engineering Leadership, and Engineering Knowledge. All employed to fulfill our destiny.” Following the Civil War, the civil works program of the Corps “was revived to benefit all sections of the reunited nation,” and that is how the Corps has been fulfilling our destiny ever since. In 1936 the Corps was given major responsibility tor flood control (until then largely a local function) .

The major activities of the Corps are the damming, widening, straightening, and deepening of rivers for barge navigation, building harbors for shipping, and construction of dams and levees and reservoirs for Hood control. It also works on disaster relief and tries to prevent beach erosion. A project can seine several purposes: building waterways, providing Hood control, hydroelectric power, or water supply. As the Corps completed the most clearly needed projects in these categories, it found new purposes, or rationales, lor its dams. The newer justifications are recreation and pollution treatment.

Pollution treatment (the government calls it “low-flow augmentation”) is provided by releasing water from a dam to wash the wastes downstream. But there are now more effective and less expensive ways of dealing with pollution.

Recreation is provided in the form of still-water lakes behind the dam, for speedboating, swimming, and fishing. But the fish that were previously there often do not continue to breed in the stilled water. And the recreation, not to mention the scenery, of the natural river that used to be there, is gone. A flood-control channel is usually surrounded by cement banks, and tfie trees are cut down when a levee is built. When the water in a reservoir is let out during the dry months, or for “low-flow augmentation/’ the “recreation" area can become a mud flat.

These problems arise because the Corps of Engineers’ mission has been narrowly defined. Other ways of dealing with transportation, power, and pollution are not in the Corps’ jurisdiction, so the Corps is left to justifying what it is permitted to do. What hydroelectric power is left to be developed will make a very small contribution to the nation’s power needs. The Corps builds its projects on sound engineering principles. If a highway cuts through a park or a city, or a dam floods more land than it protects, those are the breaks. A “straight" river is an engineer’s idea of what a river ought to be. A talk with a Corps man will bring out a phrase like, “When we built the Ohio River . . .”

The Corps argues that having military men conduct civil works “is an advantage of outstanding importance to national defense.”Actually, the military men in the civil works section of the Army Corps of Engineers represent only a thin superstructure over a large civilian bureaucracy. Most of the 1100-man uniformed Corps work solely on military construction. The civil works section of the Corps, in contrast, comprises about 200 military men, and under their direction, 32,000 civilians.

Generally, the career military engineers come from the top of their class at West Point, or from engineering schools. Once they join the Corps, they rotate between military and civil work, usually serving in the civil works division lor three-year tours. “Idle civil work is sought after, because it offers unusual responsibility and independence in the military system, and the experience is necessary for reaching the high ranks of the Corps. Through the civil work, a Corps officer can gain a sharpening of political acumen that is necessary for getting to the top. And there is tfie tradition: “The Corps built the Panama Canal,”one officer said, “and ever) Corps man knows that Robert E. Lee worked on flood control 011 the Mississippi.” ft is a secure life, and when lie retires, a military corps officer can get a good job with a large engineering firm or become director of a port authority.

The civilian bureaucracy is something else. The Corps, like other government agencies, does not attract the brightest civilian engineering graduates, for it does not offer either tfie most lucrative or the most interesting engineering careers. The Corps work is largely what is known in the trade as “cookbook engineering.” A ready-made formula is on hand for each problem. The Corps’ bureaucracy draws heavily from the South, where the engineers who built the first dams and controlled the floods tire still heroes.

The military patina gives the Corps its professional aura, its local popularity, its political success, and its independence. The military engineers are, as a group, polite, calm, and efficient, and their uniforms impress the politicians and the local citizens. The engineer who heads one of the Corps’ forty district offices, usually a colonel, is a big man in his area; the newspapers herald his coming, and he is a star speaker at the Chamber of Commerce and Rotary flinches. But the military man gets transferred, so smart money also befriends the civilian officials in the district office. These men stay in the area, and want to see it progress. The Tulsa office of the Corps, for example, has about 1500 employees, of whom only three are military. The local offices are highly autonomous, for the Corps operates by the military principles that you never give a man an order he can’t carry out, and that you trust your field commanders. If a district engineer believes strongly in a project, it is likely to get Corps endorsement, ddie Corps has mastered the art of convincing people that its projects are desirable, and so the projects are not examined very closely. Corps engineers are impressive in their command of details that non-engineers cannot understand. assiduous in publishing books that show what the Corps has done for each state, and punctilious about seeing that all the right politicians are invited to each dedic ation of a dam.

And so the Army Corps of Engineers has become one of the most independent bureaucracies in the federal government. The Corps’ civil works section is neither of great interest to the Pentagon nor answerable to more relevant civilian bureaucracies.

It makes its own living arrangements with the Congress, and deals not with the Armed Services Committees ot the House and Senate, but with the Public Works Committees. Theoretically, the Corps reports to the appointed civilian chiefs of the Department of tire Army, but these men are usually preoccupied with more urgent matters than Corps projects, and after a spell of trying to figure out what the Corps is doing, or even to control it, the civilians usually give up. “It was,” said one man who tried not long ago, “like trying to round up the Viet Cong for an appearance on the Lawrence Welk Show.”

“I think I understand . . .”

The power of the Corps stems from its relationships with Congress. It is the pet of the men from the areas it has helped the most, who also usually happen to He among the most senior and powerful members, and the ones on the committees which give the Corps its authority and its money. Thus, when the late Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma was a key member of the Senate Public Works Committee as well as the Senate Finance Committee, he devoted his considerable swashbuckling talents to winning final approval of a plan to build a navigation system stretching 450 miles from the Mississippi, up the Arkansas River, to Catoosa, Oklahoma, giving nearby Tulsa an outlet to the sea. The $1.2 billion project is said to be the largest since the Tennessee Valley Authority was built. The entire Oklahoma and Arkansas delegations, quarterbacked by a member of Kerr’s staff, carried it through. The story goes that President Kennedy, having been advised to oppose the Arkansas River project, met with Kerr to seek his help on a tax bill. Kerr, not a very subtle man, told the President ”1 hope you understand how difficult I will find it to move the tax bill with the people of Oklahoma needing this river transportation.” “You know, bob,” the President is said to have replied, “I think I understand the Arkansas River project for the first time.” After Kerr’s death, Senator John McClellan inherited the mantle of chief protector of the project, which reached the Arkunsas-Oklahoma border last December, an event that was marked by a grand dedication.

The legislation that authorizes and appropriates the money for Corps projects encourages manipulation and swapping because of the unusual way in which it parcels out the money on a project-byproject basis. It is as if a housing bill had designated X dollars for a development here and Y dollars for a development there.

A very formal document—known around Capitol Hill as “eighteen steps to glory”—explains the procedures by which a project is initiated. In actuality, what happens is that local interests who stand to gain from a Corps project—barge companies, industrialists, contractors, real estate speculators—gel together, often through the Chamber of Commerce, with the district engineer and ask for a project. The Corps literature is quite explicit about this: “When local interests feel that a need exists for any type of flood control, navigation, or other improvement, it will be most profitable for them to consult at the outset with the District Engineer. He will provide full information as to what might be done to solve their particular problem, the authorities under which it might be accomplished, and the procedures necessary to initiate the action desired.” Then the local groups ask their congressman, who is responsive to this particular segment of his constituency, to secure legislation authorizing the Corps to make a study of the project. Usually the Corps man is already aboard, but if not, he is not very far behind. “Sometimes,” said a congressman who, like most of his colleagues, declined to be named when talking about the Corps, “the Chamber of Commerce will call me, and I’ll say get in touch with Colonel So-and-so in the district office and he’s over there like a shot; Or the Corps will make an area survey and go to the community and chop hints that they might have a dam if they work on it.” Frequently the project’s promoters will form a group—the Mississippi Valley Association, the Tennessee-Tombigbee Association, the Arkansas Basin Development Association, and so on. The Florida Waterways Association. for example, boosters of the controversial Cross-Florida Barge Canal, has among its directors a realtor, representatives of a consulting engineering company, a dredging company, chambers of commerce, port authorities, newspapers, and a construction company. ‘Flic associations meet and entertain and lobby. Hie Lower Mississippi Valley Association is noted for its days-long barge parties. Some twentyto thirty-odd people from an association descend on Washington from time to time, to testify and to sec the right people in Congress and the Executive Branch.

The power to authorize the study of a project, then to initiate it, and to appropriate the money for it is held by the Senate and House Public Works Committees, and by the Public Works Subcommittees ol the Appropriations Committees of the two bodies. This is a total of seventy-one men; as is usual with congressional committees, a very few of the most senior men wield the key influence. It all comes down to a chess game played by the same players over the years—the committees, their stalls, and the Corps. There are always demands for more projects titan can be studied, authorized, or financed, and so the Corps and the politicians are alwavs in a position to do eaclt other favors. One study c an be moved ahead of another by the Corps if a man votes correctly. One project can get priority in the authorizing or appropriating stages. “Everyone is in everyone else’s thrall,” said a man who has been involved in the process, “unless he never wants a project.”

The Corps has managed LO arbitrate the demands for more projects than its budget can include through its highly developed sense of the relative political strengths within the Congress, and by making sure that each region ol the country gets a little something each time. “We try to satisfy to pet cent of the needs of each region,” said a Corps official. From time to time, the Corps has been pressed by the Budget Bureau to recommend instead the most feasible projects in the nation as a whole, but the Corps has resisted this impolitic approach. The Secretary of the Army rarely changes the Corps’ proposals. The Budget Bureau does examine the Corps’ proposals on a project-by-project basis, but it runs a poor third to the Corps and Capitol Hill in deciding what the Corps program should be. The President, who is but a passerby, cannot establish control over the public works process unless he decides to make the kind of major political fight that Presidents usually do not think is worth it. On occasion, the White House will oppose a particularly outrageous project—or, out of political exigency, support one. Outsiders are unable to penetrate the continuing feedback between the Corps and the congressional committees, and are insufficiently informed to examine the rationale, the nature, and the alternatives of each project.

There may have been a Corps of Engineers project that was rejected on the floor of Congress, but no one can recall it. Every two years—in election years—a rivers and harbors and flood-control authorization bill is passed In Congress, and every year, money is appropriated. It has been calculated that, on the average, the authorization bills have provided something for 113 congressional districts (or more than one fourth of the House of Representatives) at a time, and the appropriations Hills for 91 districts. “We used to say,” said a man involved in the process, “that we could put our mortgage in that bill and no one would notice, and then the appropriations committees would cut it by 15 percent.”The most recent appropriation carried something for 48 states. On occasion, a senator, Paul Douglas of Illinois for one, or William Proxmire of Wisconsin lor another, has spoken out against a particular Corps project, or the “pork-barrel” technique ol legislating Corps projects, but they have not been taken seriously. “One hundred fifty-five million dollars has been spent as a starter,” Proxmire once argued on the Senate floor in futile opposition to the Cross-Florida Barge Canal, “that is what it is, a starter—to make many more jobs, to make a great deal of money, and a great deal of profit. That is the essence of pork. That is why senators and congressmen fight for it and win re-election on it. Of course people who will benefit from these tens of millions ot pork profit and jobs are in favor of it. That is perfectly natural and understandable. It will snow in Washington in July when a member of Congress arises and says spare my district the pork. What a day that will be.

Douglas fought rivers and harbors projects for years and then, in 1956, made a speech saying that he was giving up. “I think it is almost hopeless,” he said, “for any senator to try to do what I tried to do when I first came to this body, namely, to consider these projects one by one. The bill is built up out of a whole system of mutual accommodations, in which the favors are widely distributed, with the implicit promise that no one will kick over the applecart; that if senators do not object to the bill as a whole, they will ‘get theirs.’ It is a process, if I may use an inelegant expression, of mutual back scratching and mutual logrolling. Any member who tries to buck the system is confronted with an impossible amount of work in trying to ascertain the relative merits of a given project.”

“Growing bananas”

The difficulty in understanding what a given Corps project will do, and what its merits are, conies not from a lack of material supplied by the Corps, but from an overabundance of it. A Corps report on a proposed project—the result of a survey that may take three to five years—is a shelf-long collection of volumes of technical material. Opponents of the project are on the defensive and unequipped to respond in kind.

Most of the projects that Congress asks the Corps to survey are, of course, turned down, because a congressman will pass along a request for a survey of almost anything. By the time a project moves through the Corps’ bureaucracy to the Board of Engineers for Rivers anti Harbors in Washington —what the Corps calls an “independent review group”—it has a promising future. The Board is made up of the Corps’ various division engineers, who present their own projects and have learned to trust each other’s judgment.

The supposedly objective standard for deciding whether a project is worthy of approval is the “benefit-to-cost” ratio. The potential benefits of a project are measured against the estimated costs, and the resulting ratio must be at least one-to-one—that is, one dollar of benefit for each dollar spent (the Corps prefers the term “invested”) —to qualify. There is, however, considerable flexibility in the process, and at times the benefit-cost ratios of controversial projects are recomputed until they come out right. This was true of the Trinity River project to make Fort Worth a seaport, the CrossFlorida Barge Canal, and projects along the Potomac River. “There is enough room in the benefittost ratio,”said a man who has worked with the Corps on Capitol Hill, “for the Corps to be responsive to strong members of Congress who really want a project.” It has been remarked that the measurements are pliant enough to prove the feasibility of growing bananas on Pikes Peak.

There is much argument over the Corps’ method of arriving at prospective benefits. For example, business that might be drawn by a project is considered among the benefits, even though there is no real way of knowing what business the project will attract and what the effects will be. The lower prices to a shipper of sending his goods by barge rather than by rail is also considered a national benefit; such a benefit may involve the fact that a wheat farmer is growing and shipping more wheat because of the lower prices, even though we do not need the wheat. The windfalls to real estate investors who have been lucky or clever enough to have bought inexpensive land—some of it underwater—in the path of a future project can turn up as a boon to us all in the form of “enhanced land values.” The land, which can then be sold and developed for industrial, housing, or resort development, undergoes extraordinary value increases.

There are serious questions about how to estimate future benefits of flood control; the 1955 Hoover Commission report said that they are often “considerably overstated.” In any event, in the three decades since the Flood Control Act was passed, annual losses clue to floods have increased (in real prices). The apparent explanation is that the construction of flood-control dams, which cannot be built to guarantee protection against all manner of floods, do nevertheless encourage developers to build expensive properties on lands that will still be hit by floods. The protection of buildings which a flood-control dam attracts is counted as a national benefit, even though the buildings might have been built in a safer place, and there are less expensive ways to protect them. Antipollution treatment and hydroelectric power are counted ;is benefits even though there are cheaper ways of cleaning water and providing power. The benefits and costs are not compared with the benefits and costs of doing these things any other way. Promised benefits appear higher than they will turn out to be because of an unrealistic way of projecting the decline of the value of the dollar. Projected recreation benefits, which have accounted for an increasing proportion of the benefit to the nation from building these projects, are based on an assumption of how much people would be willing to pay for recreation privileges, even though they don’t. The Corps lobbies to keep its parks free, in contrast to other national parks. The life of a project used to be estimated at 50 years in adding up the benefits; as fewer projects qualified, the Corps has simply shilled to a basis of 100 years. The cost of the loss of a wilderness, or a quiet river valley, is not deducted, there being no market value for that.

Since more projects are authorized than are given money to be begun, hundreds of them lie around for years, forgotten by all but the sponsors, or the sponsors’ sons, and the Corps. If a project becomes too controversial, its backers can simply out wait the opponents. When old projects, sometimes thirty years old, are dusted off, they may be started without reconsideration of either the original purposes or the benefits and costs.

Once a project is begun, its costs almost invariably outrun the estimates. Project proponents, on Lhe other hand, argue that the benefits are consistently underestimated. The Corps is very sensitive about cost “overruns.” They say that one must keep inflation in mind, and that such projects get changed and enlarged as they go along. Such changes, undermining the original benefit-cost rationale, do not seem to trouble the Congress. The Trinity River project, estimated at $790 million when iL was authorized in 1962, is now expected to cost a little over $1 billion, and construction has not yet begun. The increases are not limited to the controversial projects. A look at project costs in a 1967 Corps report, the most recent one available, shows “overruns” of over 300 percent.

“The wildest scheme”

Last year, despite a tight budget policy against “new starts,”money to begin the Trinity River project was included in Lyndon Johnson’s final budget, and was approved by the Congress. During most of his White House years, Mr. Johnson was sensitive about bestowing federal rewards upon Texas, which had benefited so handsomely from bis congressional career. Nonetheless, in the end, be overcame his scruples. The fact that he did can he credited to the persistence, and the excellent connections, of the Texas lobbyists for the project.

The major purpose of the Trinity project is to build a navigable channel from the Fort WorthDallas area 370 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Like many other projects, this one has been boosted for a long, long time. It is said that Will Rogers was brought down to Texas once to make a speech in behalf of the Trinity, which is barely wet during some of the year. “I think you’re right,” Rogers told the Trinity Improvement Association, “I think you ought to go ahead and pave it.“ There have been a number oi restudies of the feasibility of the Trinity project. At first it was justified on the basis of the shipping of wheat. The current justification assures a great deal of shipping of gravel, although there is some question as to the need to ship gravel from one end of Texas to the other. “It’s the wildest scheme I ever saw,”said a Texas politician who dared not be quoted. “They have to dig every loot of it. Then they have to put expensive locks in. You could put five railroads in for that price. I’m not carrying any brief for the railroads. You could put in a railroad and make the government pay for every inch of it and call it the United States Short Line and save a hell ot a lot of money.”

The Trinity River will feed barge traffic into another Texas-based waterways scheme, the Unit Intracoastal Canal, which, when completed, will run from Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexican border, to the west coast of Florida. From there it will link up with the Cross-Florida Barge Canal, and then another channel all the way to Trenton, New Jersey. This has given the whole network a great deal of backing, which comes together in Washington through the efforts of Dale Miller, a longtime representative of a number of Texas interests. Miller, a white-haired, soft-spoken Texan came to town in 1944 with his ambitious, ebullient wife, Scooter, and took up his father’s work in promoting projects for Texas. Miller represents the Gulf Intracoastal Canal Association, the Port of Corpus Christi, the Texas Gulf Sulphur Company, and the Chamber of Commerce of Dallas, for which the Trinity project is “the number-one program.” He is also the vice president of the Trinity Improvement Association. (“So I have a direct interest in the Trinity at both ends.”)

From the time they arrived in Washington, Dale and Scooter Miller played bridge almost every weekend with the young Corps lieutenants who lived at Fort Belvoir, just outside Washington, and now they are “good friends” with the important members of the Corps. “We move in military social circles,” says Miller. “We have them to our parties, and they have us to theirs.” The Millers also moved in Washington’s political circles, and were close friends of Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson’s, and other powerful Washingtonians. Miller was the chairman of Johnson’s inauguration in 1965. But he ami his wife had the good sense to maintain bipartisan contacts. Last year they gave a large party that was described in the social pages as “50-50 Democrats and Republicans.” Miller says that the coming ol a Republican Administration has not hindered his work: “I just put on a more conservative tie, and I’m still in business.” He works out of a suite in the Mayflower Hotel, its rooms filled with photographs of Johnson and Sam Rayburn, a harp, and a painting of the Dale Miller Bridge over the Intracoastal Canal in Corpus Christi. “It gives me an opportunity for that wonderful line,”says Miller, Tm not too big for my bridges.'

Miller is also president and chairman of the board of the National Rivers and Harbors Congress, an unusual lobbying organization made up of politicians and private interests who support federal water projects. The chairman emeritus ol the Rivers and Harbors Congress is Senator John McClellan. Among its directors are Senators Allen Ellender of Louisiana (chairman of the Public Works Appropriations Subcommittee) and Ralph Yarborough of Texas, and Congressmen Hale Boggs of Louisiana and Robert Sikes of Florida. Other officers of the group represent industries which use water transportation for their bulk cargo—such as Ashland Oil, farmers, and the coal business—and the Detroit Harbor and dredging companies. The resident executive director in Washington is George Gettinger, an elderly Indianan who has been in and out of a number of businesses and was a founder of the Wabash Valley Association, and “learned from my cash register” the value of federal water projects. “Your directors of your churches have businesses,” says Gettinger, “your trustees of your universities have businesses. Sure our people make a living in water resources, just like other people. So help me, its time we sat down and started looking at the benefits that have derived from this program. It’s one of the bright spots in solving the population problem. It has settled people along rivers so they don’t have to live in the inner city. The ghettos in this country are something it’s not good to live with.”

In its pursuit of a solution to the urban crisis, the Rivers and Harbors Congress meets every year in Washington, at the Mayflower Hotel. Its members discuss their mutual interests and then fan out about town to talk to politicians and government officials. There is a projects committee which chooses priorities among the various proposed projects. “It asks the federal agencies about the projects,” explains Gettinger. “Until the Rivers and Harbors Congress there was no kind of national clearance. Their endorsement has meant so much because it comes from a group that serves without pay.” The project committee holds hearings at each convention, and then it. adjourns to Dale Miller’s suite to decide the public works priorities. As it turns out, the projects that are mainly for navigation receive the most support. “We have no axes to grind,” says Miller. “We’re just in favor of development of water resources.”

The nationwide coalition of interested groups keeps the momentum behind the public works program, and gives the barge industry, probably the program’s largest single beneficiary, and an important national industry some seventy-five years ago, the strength to continue to win its federal largesse. Besides working with the Rivers and Harbors Congress, the barge companies have their own trade associations, which have warded off tolls for the use of the federally constructed waterways.

The only major group that opposes most Corps projects is the railroad industry, which inevitably resists federally subsidized competition. On occasion, it succeeds. It is generally believed, for example, that the railroads, working through the Pennsylvania state government, blocked “Kirwan’s ditch,” a controversial project named after Mike Kirwan of Ohio, the chairman of the House Public Works Appropriations Subcommittee. At a cost of almost $1 billion, “Kirwan’s ditch” was to link Lake Erie and the Ohio River.

The railroads also opposed the Trinity River project, but they did not succeed. Trinity had too much going for it: Jim Wright, a congressman from Fort Worth and a friend of President Johnson’s, is a senior member of the House Public Works Committee. Dale Miller, with valuable assistance from Marvin Watson when Watson was the President’s appointments secretary and later when he was the Postmaster General, was able to help the representatives of the Trinity Improvement Association get a sympathetic hearing from all the important people, including the President. Balky officials were called into Postmaster General Watson’s office to be persuaded of the value of the Trinity project.

Watson, as Miller put it, had “great familiarity with water projects in the Southwest.” He had worked for the Red River Valley Association, and the Chamber of Commerce of Daingerfield, Texas, and then Lone Star Steel, which is located just outside Daingerfield. Watson had been a major force in securing, with the help of then Senator Johnson, a Corps water project which left Lone Star Steel with water and several of the surrounding little towns with higher taxes to pay off bonds which they had approved, in the mistaken impression that they too could draw water from the project. (It was later determined that they were too far away, and Watson became a very controversial figure in East Texas.) Watson maintained his efforts on behalf of the Red River Valley projects after he took up official positions in Washington. The Red River navigation project, to build a waterway from Daingerfield, Texas, to the Mississippi River, was authorized in 1968 to go as far as Shreveport.

After many years of success, Dale Miller’s projects, like so many others, are now coming under fire because of wlrat they will do to the environment. There is a “missing link” between the Gulf Intracoastal Canal and the Cross-Florida Barge Canal on the long way from Brownsville, Texas, to Trenton, New Jersey. The link has been authorized, but construction is being opposed. A navigation channel from Miami to Trenton already exists. “That doesn’t carry a tremendous amount of tonnage,”Miller says, “but it carries a tremendous amount of recreational traffic, people in their yachts and everything.

“The problem which all developers—which we are—now face is the growing awareness of environmental problems. I mean ecological change. It’s a very difficult area because we don’t know too much about it—what effects dredging will have on babyshrimp, or marine life. It cuts both ways. We had developed that whole Gulf part of it before anyoneraised tlie question of the effects. Nature is much more resilient than people think it is. In dredging, you may disturb an estuary where baby shrimp and marine life were, but it didn’t mean permanent destruction, just change. They were breeding somewhere else in a year. In this missing link we’re going to have to satisfy the ecologists in advance, and it’s going to be very difficult. I’m convinced that the developers and the preservationists are not as far apart as people think. I think the difference can be reconciled and then we can move even faster. The problem a lot of us have, paraphrasing the little-old-ladies-in-tennis-shoes approach, is that we’re not dealing with the knowledgeable and experienced people in ecology, but the bird watchers and butterfly-net people who don’t want anything changed anywhere, and you can’t deal with them.”

Controversial Corps of Engineers Projects

Cross-Florida Barge Canal

The Oklawaha River in northern Florida is—or was—one of the few remaining wild rivers in the nation. A fast-moving clear river, the Oklawaha runs through cypress swamps and wilderness. The river itself holds bass, sunfish, and other fish, and the woods contain deer, bear, and wild turkey; this was the country of The Yearling. But it was also in the path of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal, whose clams will turn some 45 miles of the Oklawaha into shallow lakes, and flood 27,000 acres of the surrounding forests.

The Cross-Florida Barge Canal was talked about as a possibility as far back as the early 1800s, at that point as a way of protecting shipping from pirates. The idea was revived in the 1930s as a jobproducing program, and then again in the 1940s as a way of defending shipping from enemy submarines. It is now under way. Work on it finally began in 1964 as a navigation and recreation project. A Florida legislator who is taking the unusual posture of opposition to the project says, “The villain in the case of the barge canal is like an octopus. One of the tentacles is the Corps of Engineers and its blundering construction. Another consists of self-serving politicians, and still another is made up of the special interests, such as the phosphate, transportation, and paper industries. And finally, there are the state agencies, which from the start ignored the conservationists’ warnings.”

The benefit-cost ratio of the project has been a thing of change. From time to time new “benefits” have been added— flood control, “land-enhancement benefits” from the improved real estate around the reservoirs, and recreation. The interest rate charged against benefits is unusually low. Still, the benefits are to be only $1.50 for every $1.00 “invested.”

At one time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote a report on the project predicting that the dredging and damming and flooding of the area would destroy the game, the fishing, and the land; that the habitats supporting waterfowl, deer, and squirrel would be ruined. The Florida Board of Conservation, however, said that “it is inaccurate to think of the river as being destroyed or despoiled. Instead, a different set of wildlife and esthetic values will emerge . . . . The river in its original form is admittedly a stream of great beauty, but its retention in its original state would become a preservationist ideal involving enjoyment by a comparatively small group of elite purists rather than fuller use and greater enjoyment by a broad segment of the people. The economic benefits that would be foregone by a failure to complete the canal would place an extraordinarily high premium and economic burden on a less elite but overwhelming majority.” The Florida Board of Conservation (now with a new title) contains the Division of Waterways Development. The head of the division was the Corps’ district engineer for the project at the time it was revived in 1962.

One dam on the Oklawaha has already been completed. Behind it was created a giant, shallow, still pool filled with debris, logs, and weeds. The Corps has been trying to clear the pool; it sprayed the weeds with chemicals, which led to rotting weeds. This is expected to lead to algae and dead fish. The pool caused a new outcry over the project, anti conservationists and ecologists from around the country have joined to try to stop it or move it. In a new approach a suit has been filed against the Corps to stop the canal. The grounds are that the Corps committed tire people of the United States to expenditures “far in excess of the amounts contemplated” and that it denies “the rights of tire people ... to the full benefit, use and enjoyment of the economic, recreational, educational, social, cultural and historic values of the Oklawaha Regional Ecosystem.”

The project’s defenders suggest that the railroads are behind the uproar. The canal’s supporters have been holding meetings and ceremonies and fish fries to drum up enthusiasm for the project. They stress that the canal will provide business growth and add to the national defense.

Everglades National Park

To the south of the canal, the Everglades National Park has been endangered by Corps projects. Idle park’s plant life, fish, alligators, and birds are linked in a complicated state of mutual dependence, all dependent in turn on a steady flow of fresh water from the North. A good part of that water has been diverted by the Corps for the benefit of farmers and developers in South Florida, and during a drought a few years ago, the park did not receive the necessary water from the flood-control project. This led to the death of thousands of birds and fish, and turned grassy areas into cracked, lifeless flatlands. The park has not yet recovered.

Now the Corps proposes to expand the South Florida water project. Yet it refuses to guarantee that in times of water shortages the park would receive the necessary water. It says that it cannot impose such a requirement on the state of Florida. Senator Nelson, who had been leading the fight in Washington to protect the park, charges that “the Corps is playing the game with the industrial development of Florida, and not protecting the other constituency, the Everglades, a park that belongs to tire country.”

The controversial plan to build a jetport in the Everglades does not involve the Corps. The plan has now been scaled down to one for a temporary training strip, which some predict will still have serious consequences for the park. There are yet other schemes for developing South Florida that would change the flow of the water in the park. Without some national protection, the Everglades could well be doomed.

The Oakley Dam

In Illinois, a dam to supply water tO the city of Decatur, population 100,000, has been filling with silt, and so the city’s Chamber of Commerce and the Corps dusted off a 1939 plan for a larger dam, the Oakley Dam. The new dam is to provide water, flood control, and recreation, with the water supply being the smallest component of the project. When the benefit-cost ratio came out negative, the Corps added “low-flow augmentation” as a purpose. Decatur real estate developers have formed the Oakley Land Owners Association in anticipation of the real estate profits—they expect the price to go from $300 to $3000 an acre— from the land near the new dam. The opposition to the dam arose when iL was realized that the reservoir would flood Allerton Park, a 1500-acre nature area maintained by the University of Illinois.

The Allerton Park opposition was better equipped than opponents in the usual Corps controversy because the university hired an engineering consultant. The engineering report showed that there was an underground supply of water for Decatur, and that advanced waste treatment was more efficient than “low-flow augmentation.” But both are alternatives which the Corps, by the definition of its job, does not consider. And both would cost Decatur, as opposed to the federal government, more money.

Other Dams

In Indiana, conservationists are fighting a dam on a Wabash River tributary, Big Walnut Creek, which would flood one of the few virgin forests remaining in the Midwest.

In Arkansas, Corps plans to dam the free-flowing Buffalo River raised so much controversy that even the state’s senators are proposing that it be preserved as a wild river.

There are disputes over proposals by the Corps to place some dams along the Potomac River, at one time justified on the basis of hydroelectric power, then on pollution treatment, and then on water supply and recreation. The basis of the opposition is that it would destroy a beautiful valley and the natural life that lies within it.

Opponents of the project retained a consulting engineer, who reported that there were more feasible methods of obtaining both a water supply and pollution abatement.

The Corps has plans to place a dam on the last remaining natural stretch of the Columbia River in the Northwest, a breeding ground for salmon, bass, and other fish as well as birds; the main purpose is water navigation.

As the country runs out of choice land near the cities, the solution has been to fill in the adjacent waterways. Besides what such schemes do to the scenery, it is now beginning to be understood what they do to natural life. Estuaries, or those places where rivers meet the sea, provide a special balance of salt and fresh water that is essential to certain fish, such as oysters and shrimp. They also provide food and habitats for waterfowl. The damming of rivers has also damaged estuarine life. Local governments are often willing to have the estuaries dredged and filled, for this raises the real estate values, and hence the local tax base. One third of San Francisco Bay, lor example, has already been filled in, most of it for airport runways, industrial parks, and areas proposed for residential subdivisions. “It is conceivable,” said Congressman Paul McCloskey, who had fought for conservation as a lawyer before coming to Congress in 1967, “that by 1990 the filling of shallow waters of the Bay could reduce it to the status of a river across which our grandchildren will be skipping rocks.”

In response to criticism of its easiness with grant-

ing land-fill permits, and to a recent federal requirement that the Corps consider the effects on fish and wildlife, the Corps has begun to deny some permits. One such denial, however, was challenged in court, and a district judge in Florida ruled that the Corps did not have discretion to deny a permit on any grounds other than that it would impede navigation. The case is still in the courts. The Corps argues, with some validity, that it should not be making zoning decisions for local governments. “This points up the fact,” said McCloskey, “that some new national land-use authority must be created which will have the power to put federal zoning on waterways, historic sites, and land areas of particular national significance.” Such a policy would protect such areas as the Everglades. Congressman Richard Ottinger of New York, also a man interested in conservation before it became fashionable, has been pushing legislation to require that the effects on the environment must be taken into account in any federal program which contributes to construction or issues licenses—the Corps, airport and highway programs, and so on.

“Luxurious areas”

The Corps of Engineers public works program has been, among other things, an income-transfer program, and this is a good time to look more closely at who has been transferring what to whom. The federal government has been paying for the Corps program—or rather, all of the taxpayers have. And the Corps program consists in the main of subsidies for irrigation, navigation, and Hood control. Some projects have been for the benefit of only one particular industry. Former Senator Douglas has charged, for example, that a project to deepen the Detroit River was for the benefit of the Detroit Edison Company alone, and that a project to deepen the Delaware River from Philadelphia to Trenton was to serve one mill of the United States Steel Corporation, which was quite able to pay for the project itself. An industry or developer builds on a Hood plain and then asks the federal government to save it from Hoods. A wild river is converted for use by an industry; subsequently a federal subsidy is given to clean up the industry’s pollution of the river. The barge industry is kept afloat because it is there.

Robert Haveman, an economist and author of Water Resource Investment and the Public Interest, has shown that the preponderance of Corps projects has gone to three regions: the South and Southwest, the Far West, and North and South Dakota, but mainly to the South, in particular the lower Mississippi River area. Within an area, the rewards are not evenly spread. The major beneficiaries of the flood-control projects which also provide water for irrigation have been the large landholders—in particular, in the Mississippi Delta and San Joaquin Valley. These are the same landowners who are paid the largest federal farm subsidies for not growing the crops which the federal water projects make it possible for them to grow. The Corps is still preparing to produce more farmland, in the name of flood control, in the Mississippi Delta region.

The Corps, in a publication called “The Army Engineers’ Contributions to American Beauty,” notes: “In Dallas, the flood-control project for channeling the Hood waters of the Trinity River through the center of town (once some of the least desirable real estate in the city) is being made into a long, winding stretch of parkway. In Los Angeles and other Pacific Coast cities built below mountain slopes, the development of attractive and sometimes luxurious residential areas has been made possible by Army Engineer projects which curb flash floods.”

“An idea”

The Corps established an environmental division a few years ago, to advise on the environmental effects of its projects. This summer it is sponsoring a seminar on how it can better “communicate” with the public. Corps officials have been urging greater environmental concerns on the Corps members, and on their clientele, appealing, among other things, to their self-interest. In a recent speech, Major General F. P. Koisch, director of the Corps’ Civil Works Division, told the Gulf Intracoastal Canal Association to listen to “the voice of the so-called ‘New Conservation.'

“By and large,” he said, “its advocates oppose the old concepts of expansion and development. Yet they are not merely negative, for they are willing to lavish huge sums on programs which embody their own conceptions of natural resource management. Their theories and concepts are not always consistent nor fully worked out. They are less concerned with means than with ends and goals— their vision of a better America. But they do seem to represent an idea whose time has come. So it grows clearer every day that it is up to us, who like to think of ourselves as scientific, practical men who know how to get things done, to make this new idea our own and make it work. . . . This can open a whole new career for the Gulf Intracoastal Canal Association. . . . This business of ecology,” says General Koisch, “we’re concerned, but people don’t know enough about it to give good advice. You have to stand still and study life cycles, and we don’t have time. We have to develop before 1980 as much water resource development as has taken place in the whole history of the nation.”

“It is a fact,” said General Richard H. Groves, his deputy, in a speech, “that our nation is engaged in a struggle to survive its technology and its habits. It is a fact, too, that we are defiling our waters, polluting our air, littering our land, and infecting our soil and ourselves with the wastes which our civilization produces. These are serious problems, but we cannot permit ourselves to yield to an emotional impulse that would make their cure the central purpose of our society. Nor is there any reason why we should feel guilty about the alterations which we have to make in the natural environment as we meet our water-related needs.”

In an interview, General Groves said he did not believe that the basic role of the Corps would change. “Certainly, parts of it will. One part that is obvious is control of pollution, control of the ecology, which is more or less the same. There are very heavy pressures that have developed, and nobody in this business can ignore them. We would hope that in responding to these pressures we don’t lose sight of the need to keep everything in perspective. The program keeps growing. The program as you know is tied to people, and the people double every forty years. . . . We build the program,” he said—and here is the heart of it all—“on the notion that people want an everincreasing standard of living, and the standard of living is tied to water programs. If you conserve undeveloped areas, you’re not going to be able to do it. If you double the population and they double their standard of living, you have to keep going. It’s not as simple as the people who take an extreme view say,”

Clearly, no rational settlement of the conflict between “progress” and the environment is going to come from dam-by-dam fights between the Corps and the conservationists. The conservationists have been out there all alone all these years, and they have worked hard, but they have lacked a national strategy. In some instances, they have tried to have it all ways: opposing not only hydroelectric projects but also alternatives such as generating power through binning fuels (air pollution) or building a nuclear plant (thermal pollution and radiation hazards) . Some conservationists have been interested in “preserving” the wildlife so that they could shoot it. Where engineers have been pitted against engineers, as in the case of the Oakley and Potomac dams, the opponents have been more successfid. “The only way to resist,” says Representative John Saylor of Pennsylvania, a critic of the Corps lor years, “is to know a little more about the Corps than the Chambers of Commerce do.” The new approach of trying to build a body of law on the basis of the “rights of the people” against a public works project could be of profound importance.

Some water economists have suggested quite seriously a ten-year moratorium on water projects. There is an ample supply of water, they say. Problems arise where industries use it inefficiently because it is provided so cheaply, and pollute much of it. The answer for the pollution, the experts say, is sewage treatment at the point where the pollution originates.

So one solution to the problems the Corps program creates woidd lie simply to stop it. The Corps anti the Public Works Committees and the river associations could give themselves a grand testimonial dinner, congratulate themselves on their good works, and go out of business. There are more effective ways of transferring money—for instance, directly—if that is what we want to do; there are others who need the money more. But such suggestions are not, of course, “practical.”

For as long as anyone can remember, there have been proposals for removing the public works program from the military, and transferring the Corps’ civil functions, or at least the planning functions, to the Interior Department or a new department dealing with natural resources. President Nixon considered similar ideas, but rejected them in preparing his message on the environment. The Corps likes being where it is, and the powerful Forest Service and Soil Conservation Service, which are secure in the Agriculture Department, and the congressional committees whose power derives from the present arrangements, have habitually and successfully resisted up to now. “The two most powerful intragovernmental lobbies in Washington are the Forest Service and the Army Engineers,” wrote FDR’s Interior Secretary Harold likes in his diary in 1937, in the midst of a vain effort to reorganize them and Interior into a new Department of Conservation. Whatever the chances for reform, it has never been clear who would be swallowing whom as a result of such a change. The closed-circuit system by which public works decisions are made should be opened to other interested parties. Certainly a federal program that is more than a century old should be overhauled. The Corps is now at work on some internal improvements, but bureaucracies are not notably rigorous about selfchange, and the water interests do not want change.

If there are to be a Corps and a Corps public works program, then proposals to expand the Corps Junctions make sense. Making the Corps responsible lor sewage treatment, for example, would give it a task that needs to be done, local governments a benefit which they really need and which would be widely shared, and politicians a new form of largesse to hand around. Antipollution could be spared the pork barrel through a combination of requirements for local action and federal incentives, and through adecpiate financing. Yet making antipollution part of the pork barrel may be just what it needs. Programs which appeal to greed are notably more politically successful than those that do not. The Corps’ engineering expertise, in any event, could be put to use for something other than building dams and straightening rivers. It is the judgment of just about every economist who has studied the public works program that there should be cost-sharing and user charges. There have been proposals for making the beneficiaries of flood-control and navigation projects and harbors pay for them, or at least part of them.

In a period of great needs and limited resources, a high proportion of the public works program amounts to inefficient expenditures and long-range commitments of money on behalf of those who make the most noise and pull the most strings. Despite all the talk about “reordering priorities,” the Nixon Administration’s budget for the next year increases the money for the Corps. Even if the nation should want to double its standard of living (leaving aside for the moment the question of whose standard of living) and even if the public works programs really could help bring that about, it would be good to know more about the nature and price of such a commitment. At a time when a number of our domestic arrangements are coming under re-examination, this one is a prime candidate for reform. Meanwhile, the changes it is making in the nation are irreversible. □