Engineer Memoirs
year I was finding out it was very little, and telling them that the next year had better
be better.
This series of meetings the second year was somewhat brutal. I think most of them
decided they didn't want to go through that another time, so when the third year came
along, there was real progress.
Q:
But you waited until the second year before you really put the squeeze on them.
A:
I really didn't have a basis for doing it in the first year. We went over where they stood.
There really wasn't any basis for scrutinizing them on what they had done in the
preceding year because there was no schedule or goals. If there were, they were very
ethereal.
But then, in the first set of meetings, we agreed on where they would go for the next
year. That was part of the examination. Where are you and what are your plans? They
would come up with a milestone schedule for each study, the progress in preparing the
report, the hearings that would be held, and so forth. When we got together the second
year, the question was whether they had done those things. To a large extent they had
not. Some had, but some hadn't taken it too seriously.
When you projected that you were going to complete a study in three years, if you let
a third of the study time go by without accomplishing much, there was an issue of
whether there was going to be enough money.
The last thing I wanted to do was to go back to Congress and say, having told them we
could complete this study for 0,000, that we now needed more money because we
hadn't finished it. To me that was totally unacceptable, because we would go in every
year saying what it was going to cost to complete these things.
We had to ask for a lot more money the first year I went to Congress, and the second
year we had to ask for some, but I was bound and determined that I wasn't going to ask
for a penny more the third year. There was no excuse for that. I got over to my district
engineers that that was what I expected. I think they, and their staffs, couldn't believe
it at first, but then they got the word.
Q:
In your first year there, the year that you are doing a lot of your learning--of course,
you do a lot of learning by listening. But how do you decide whom to listen to?
A:
That's an interesting question. I listened to everybody. I listened to the Corps of
Engineers itself, but, of course, there were a lot of outsiders that were interested. The
members of Congress had a certain view of the way things were. The local authorities.
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