Engineer Memoirs
idea that these plans had some meaning. If they said they were going to do this, that
was expected.
This whole process of making up your mind what you're going to do and then doing
it was new to many of them. Let's put it this way. They hadn't been doing that recently.
The division did turn around. There's no question about it.
Q:
So you approached the problem of turning it around from the top, through the district
engineers.
A:
Absolutely. There were a lot of details. But as far as I was concerned, we had a job to
do. We had to plan. The planning function involves studies.
[Lieutenant General John W.] Jack Morris replaced Frank Koisch as Director of Civil
Works. He came from being the Missouri River division engineer. He very much
wanted to improve the planning function and reduce the number of studies, put enough
money into the studies to get them finished, get reports out--the whole business of
having milestones.
Frank Koisch hadn't had this attitude. He had had the attitude that in many cases the
members of Congress really didn't care whether these studies were really ever finished
or not. They just wanted to be able to tell their constituents that this and that problem
in the river and harbor area was being studied, and that was enough.
Morris and I had a different view. We ought to study it. We ought to decide whether
there should be a project or not, get it finished, get it out of the district, get it out of the
division, get it to the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors, have them act on it,
and get it up to the Chief and get it over to Congress, whether the report was favorable
or unfavorable, and then go on to another one--rather than having some of these things
that had been under study for ten years.
You may have heard about the length of time it takes to get a project authorized and
built in the Corps. We felt that was a bad situation. It was much too long.
Q:
You were a soldier and you came into the civil works job in the new environmental
context and you dealt with it. But your employees were not soldiers.
A:
There were complaints about the fact that the environmental movement was using
unfair tactics. But once they saw that we were going to try to be responsive to the
environment, I think there was a willingness to do it. It had a big impact on the study
program because you had to integrate the Corps' study effort with the environmental
impact statement. It was a struggle to build this interface.
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