WASHINGTON - Arkansas’ Rep. Rick Crawford pushed for the Army Corps of Engineers to speed up its process for approving navigation, harbor maintenance and flood-control projects during a Wednesday House committee hearing.
Crawford, a Republican from Jonesboro, said Arkansas is highly dependent on waterborne commerce, but a backlog of Corps repairs have put the state’s river system in jeopardy.
“You can only patch so much with duct tape and baling wire before you have to invest in upgrades,” he said.
Major Gen. Michael Walsh, the Corps’ deputy commanding general for civil and emergency operations, said the Corps was moving faster. On Wednesday, he described to Crawford and other committee members what he calls the agency’s “3x3x3” approach to streamlining projects.
Beginning in October, the agency will attempt to complete all project studies within three years at a cost of less than $3 million. The agency will convene meetings of Corps officials at three layers of the department’s bureaucracy - at the district, division and headquarters level - in an attempt to determine project priorities more quickly.
Currently, a typical project study takes at least seven years to complete.
“I think we’re going to move more rapidly as we move into a decision-type report,” he said.
Last year, Walsh said, the agency reduced its backlog of project feasibility studies from 650 to 200 by shelving projects the agency deemed unlikely to be completed within a few years.
Lawmakers on the panel said change is needed.
“We are literally studying infrastructure projects to death,” said Rep. Rob Gibbs, a Republican from Ohio and chairman of the House Transportation Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.
The process to get projects approved is “a mind-numbing, convoluted, multi-layered flowchart,” said Rep. Timothy Bishop of New York, the panel’s ranking Democrat.
Walsh said inconsistent levels of funding from the federal government made it difficult to complete project appraisals quickly.
“The stop-and-start funding certainly hurts,” Walsh said.
Crawford, who last week announced the formation of the Arkansas Rivers and Maritime Advisory Council to study the state’s waterways, said the Corps’ unwieldy process failed to provide needed funding for essential priorities, such as maintaining locks and dams.
Crawford asked Walsh if the Corps was pursuing private funding, such as user fees, to help in the repairs.
“We’ve got a team trying to figure out how to pull together a public-private partnership to try to transfer some of those responsibilities to someone else,” Walsh responded.
In an interview, Crawford said Walsh’s response was “encouraging.”
“A lot of those locks are original equipment,” Crawford said. “They haven’t been upgraded in 50-plus years. In many cases they’re literally falling apart.
As Walsh spoke to the lawmakers, one of the Corps’ studies - on projects on the Louisiana coast-was displayed in front of the committee room. The12 gray binders holding the 9,000-page report stretched for three feet. A goal of the Corps “3x3x3” plan is to limit reports to 100 pages.
Gene Higginbotham, the executive director of the Arkansas Waterways Commission, said navigation studies on projects on the Red River and the White River had cost more than $5 million each. The Red River study was started more than three years ago, and the White River study was initiated nearly 10 years ago, he said.
A maze of federal requirements is partially to blame for the hold-up, Higginbotham said. He said the demise of earmarks, where legislators were able to direct funds to their favorite projects would also make it difficult for the Corps to reach its goal of completing studies within three years.
“It’s good in theory,” Higginbotham said in a phone interview. “In fact, it’s great in theory. But I’m not sure three years is actually possible.”
Front Section, Pages 4 on 06/06/2013