Eutrusca
19-07-2006, 18:42
COMMENTARY: Cut the pork that's squeezing out needed environmental Army Corps of Engineers' projects. Sounds like a winner to me. Contact your gongressperson and/or senator?
A Chance to Reform the Corps (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/opinion/19wed3.html?th&emc=th)
Published: July 19, 2006
The Senate has a rare opportunity today to strike a blow for both fiscal sanity and environmental stewardship. It will consider several amendments that would bring a measure of discipline and independent oversight to the Army Corps of Engineers, a notoriously spendthrift agency with a history of answering to no one except a few members of Congress who control its purse strings.
The reputation of the Corps is now at a low ebb because of levee failures in New Orleans. But well before that debacle, studies by the National Academy of Sciences and others had found that the agency routinely inflated the economic payoffs of its construction projects to justify steadily greater budget outlays, while underestimating the environmental damage of those projects.
The amendments’ main sponsors are the Senate’s reformist duo of John McCain and Russ Feingold. One amendment would subject any project costing more than $40 million to an independent review of the project’s design, feasibility, cost and environmental consequences. A second amendment would require that projects be ranked in order of importance based on established national priorities like flood control and environmental restoration. This amendment is aimed less at the Corps than its Congressional paymasters, who have historically put their own local pork barrel projects ahead of more urgent and generally accepted needs.
The sponsors will try to attach these amendments to the five-year $40 billion Water Resources Development bill, itself overdue even though it includes several important provisions. One authorizes $1.5 billion for key elements of the Everglades restoration project, which has suffered from Congressional neglect. Another would jump-start a major effort to reverse the erosion of coastal wetlands that has left Louisiana vulnerable to flooding.
A bill this size inevitably has the usual ration of local pork. But some of this would now be subject to outside review and possible rejection if the McCain-Feingold amendments stick. As they should. These reforms made sense when first offered in 2002. Post-Katrina, they are essential.
A Chance to Reform the Corps (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/opinion/19wed3.html?th&emc=th)
Published: July 19, 2006
The Senate has a rare opportunity today to strike a blow for both fiscal sanity and environmental stewardship. It will consider several amendments that would bring a measure of discipline and independent oversight to the Army Corps of Engineers, a notoriously spendthrift agency with a history of answering to no one except a few members of Congress who control its purse strings.
The reputation of the Corps is now at a low ebb because of levee failures in New Orleans. But well before that debacle, studies by the National Academy of Sciences and others had found that the agency routinely inflated the economic payoffs of its construction projects to justify steadily greater budget outlays, while underestimating the environmental damage of those projects.
The amendments’ main sponsors are the Senate’s reformist duo of John McCain and Russ Feingold. One amendment would subject any project costing more than $40 million to an independent review of the project’s design, feasibility, cost and environmental consequences. A second amendment would require that projects be ranked in order of importance based on established national priorities like flood control and environmental restoration. This amendment is aimed less at the Corps than its Congressional paymasters, who have historically put their own local pork barrel projects ahead of more urgent and generally accepted needs.
The sponsors will try to attach these amendments to the five-year $40 billion Water Resources Development bill, itself overdue even though it includes several important provisions. One authorizes $1.5 billion for key elements of the Everglades restoration project, which has suffered from Congressional neglect. Another would jump-start a major effort to reverse the erosion of coastal wetlands that has left Louisiana vulnerable to flooding.
A bill this size inevitably has the usual ration of local pork. But some of this would now be subject to outside review and possible rejection if the McCain-Feingold amendments stick. As they should. These reforms made sense when first offered in 2002. Post-Katrina, they are essential.