This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: WASHINGTON – As long-delayed water resources legislation moves through Congress, lawmakers and river-city mayors want to make sure the downstream results are beneficial to the Mississippi River region.
This week, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and some river colleagues – including the mayors of Clarksville, Mo., and Alton and Grafton, Ill. – visited Capitol Hill to present their agenda for improving Mississippi commerce, ecology and transport to lawmakers who represent river states.
On Thursday, the group – the Mississippi River Cities & Towns Initiative (MRCTI), which was created last year and held its initial meeting in St. Louis in September-- planned to present that agenda in a House caucus room with a 50-foot-long floor map of the river and a photo exhibit of river scenes.
“Mayor Slay was in today, along with other mayors [of towns] along the Mississippi River and we talked about using that great asset – and the increased value it has – as the Panama Canal becomes an even bigger avenue of commerce,” said U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., the co-founder of the congressional Mississippi River Caucus.
Slay wasn’t available for comment, but he sent Tweets saying that advocating for the river is bipartisan, that “federal investment in critical infrastructure lags that of most developed nations,” and “U.S. ports are NOT ready to take advantage” of the expected increase in commerce resulting from the Panama Canal’s expansion in 2015.
The Mississippi River transports about 62 percent of the nation’s agricultural output, delivers nearly 400 tons of coal and petroleum products, provides drinking water for more than 18 million people, and directly supports more than a million jobs in its 37-state river basin.
Senate panel approves water resources bill
As the mayor’s group was making the rounds, the future of federal support for major river infrastructure improvements was being set by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which approved a new Water Resources Development Act. The bill was jointly sponsored by the panel’s chair, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and ranking GOP member, Sen. David Vitter, R-La.
The bill includes reforms to allow more flexibility for non-federal sponsors of Corps of Engineers projects and to accelerate such projects. This includes requirements that the Corps finish new feasibility studies in three years or less; streamline the environmental review process; and create pilot programs to expand the local role in project implementation.
U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., had urged the committee to include their bill to set up a pilot program for potential agreements between the Army Corps of Engineers and private entities as alternatives to traditional modes of financing, design, and construction.
While only limited public-private partnership provisions made it into the committee bill, a Durbin spokeswoman said Wednesday that the senator is “going to continue working the bill to gain support for Senator Durbin's public-private partnership language when the WRDA bill comes to the floor” for Senate amendments.
Among the major infrastructure projects that might possibly be affected by partnership programs are proposals to rebuild key locks and dams on the upper Mississippi River. This week, an infrastructure “report card” issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a grade of D for dams and D-minus for inland waterways, levees and ports.
“Preserving commerce on the Mississippi – and the rest of America’s ports and waterways – is essential to our economy,” Durbin said in a speech this week to the national Waterways Council, which represents business sectors that depend on river transportation.
Asked about the need for more public-private partnerships to pay for major infrastructure projects, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said Wednesday that she would “love to see an encouragement of public-private partnerships. I know the barge industry wants to be part of the solution to this problem. They are willing to tax themselves to help with this. And I think we need to encourage those partnerships everywhere we can.”
In a conference call with reporters, Boxer said the committee-approved water development bill did not include a proposal – backed by some senators – that would revamp the Inland Waterways Trust Fund (IWTF) to make it more viable by increasing user fees and the federal share of Inland Waterway costs. However, she said such a plan would likely be debated in the full Senate as an amendment to the committee bill.
The trust fund is now supported by a 20 cents a gallon user fee on barge fuel. Since 1986, the federal government and industry users have split the costs 50/50 of many big construction and waterway rehabilitation projects. But project overruns and rising construction costs have depleted the fund. And the river transport industry says the financing system should be changed to cover the cost of major rehabilitation projects.
Boxer said the committee bill eliminates project earmarks, which McCaskill said was a good thing. “Should somebody get a water project in Utah because they are on a certain committee, as opposed to us getting a locks and dams finally up to a priority status on the Mississippi?” McCaskill told reporters. “The Mississippi is a major navigation [route] for our country, a major flow of goods and services, a major part of our economy.”
McCaskill added: “If we would allow the Army Corps to prioritize, publicly, where there is the most impact for dollars spent, Missouri’s going to do fine. We have a lot of rivers that are important to our nation’s economy.”
Mayors, lawmakers discuss river priorities
In his meeting with Slay and other river-city mayors, Blunt said, they discussed the potential to increase Mississippi River commerce and transport, especially with the potential for transporting new shale oil and gas resources on the river.
“The river is a win-win” for transportation, Blunt said. But he added that many problems need to be solved before the river’s transport potential is maximized.
Part of the challenge is “trying to figure out how we appreciate these assets … using the river in a better way,” Blunt told reporters.
“How does the Corps of Engineers prioritize their spending? Right now, the Corps will automatically dredge a post that has X million tons of cargo go through it a year … And none of our ports along the river from St. Louis to the end of the Bootheel have [that tonnage.] But, collectively, they have a lot of volume, a lot of tonnage go through them.
“One thing I’ve been looking at is how to view all of those closely located geographic ports as a system rather than an individual port. So that we get our share of the money that’s going to be spent anyway for something like dredging. There’s substantial economic activity involved in that which provides more money for state and federal government because of the activity that happens there.”
While Blunt said he is “supportive of more public-private partnerships” on major infrastructure projects, he added that he also wants more focus on “government-to-government partnerships – the 35 percent partnerships that most of our levee districts and others have with the Corps.
“Some of them can come up with that 35 percent fairly easily, but some of them have a real challenge. What kind of innovative things can we do, through rural loan guarantees or other things, that allow those entities to be part of the overall spending?”