Ernest Graves
much as it ever would in accordance with the way I thought it should, and we were able
to complete a number of things.
The division wasn't very active in construction. After all, in terms of water resource
development, that part of the world is fairly mature. People have been on the Great
Lakes since the French and English first came over. The channels have been dug and
the locks have been built and so forth. But there were a number of studies ongoing
about enhancements and extensions. These had been dragging on forever, because the
division didn't have an ethic of finishing these studies.
Jack Morris was the Director of Civil Works at the time, and he and I were in total
agreement that you should finish studies. In fact, that was the difference between Jack,
on the one hand, and his predecessor, Frank Koisch, who tended to feel that the study
effort was something that Congress preferred to see proceed at a low, inconclusive
level.
Jack and I felt that we should concentrate on fewer studies and get them done. That's
what we tried to do. We had a rule of thumb that no district should have more than six
studies at any one time. This had to do with how many public hearings the district
engineer could handle, the size of the planning staff, and what you might call
management span. If you had more than six studies, you couldn't keep track of them.
You couldn't press ahead with them.
For the North Central Division with five districts, that would have made 30 studies for
the division. That was more than enough in terms of our involvement from the division
level. In the third year, it got to the point that I really did know what the 30 studies
were that we were supposed to be pushing. I could call the district engineers to
account.
I may have mentioned earlier the notion that I developed from my first experience when
I came to the division. I had to go up to Congress to testify on what we had done with
the money it had appropriated the year before. I got a lot of questions, and I realized
that the division had not done that much with the money it had in the year preceding my
arrival.
I determined that the next time I went back up there I was going to give an accounting
of what we had done with the money. The construction was fairly straightforward. Even
in maintenance it was not too difficult. But in the study program, it was extraordinarily
difficult, because if you never finished any studies, what progress could you reflect?
That's the way I started the set of milestone meetings with my district engineers. This
illustrates the notion--in the first year I was learning what was going on and the second
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