Vernon
They kind of dragged their feet in a lot of areas, not wanting to go as far as the
environmentalists wanted to go. So there was a constant give and take between the Corps
and the environmentalists about how far should you go to keep people out of the wetlands.
How much they needed to provide to take care of the damage that they had caused. But
it took a lot of negotiating and so forth to get all those things ironed out so that everybody
agreed on what were correct requirements.
Q ..
Wetlands are still a major point of confrontation, I think, in the environmental area.
A ..
Oh, yes. Everything you do almost has some adverse impact on the wetland. You build
a highway, a railroad, or a city or develop--especially if you do any kind of water
resources development, why build dams and levees and that sort of thing, they're all in the
wetland.
Q ..
That's why the Corps is such a favorite of the environmentalists.
A ..
The Corps has problems of their own, taking care of their own environmental problems.
EPA would be after the Corps to do more than they had done and mitigate obviously in
most cases, the Corps would say, "Well, this is enough. EPA would say, "Hey, haven't
even begun to provide what you should. So they'd have to do some more negotiating and
come up with something that would satisfy both of them.
Q ..
Weren't there various contending factors within the Corps itself onthese issues? I mean
there was a lot of internal strife on these environmental questions.
A ..
It tends to go along with professional biases. When you get biologists and zoologists and
people that deal with fish and wildlife and all that type of thing, why they're obviously
going to be much more interested in preserving whatever we have. If you're a structural
engineer and you want to build structures, you're not so interested whether some little
obscure fish is going to be endangered or not. So, I think also, major structural works
have been held up for years because of some minor endangered species.
Q ..
Or completely lost in some cases.
Some of the projects, they were never built. In some cases, why, of course, the people
A
that were fighting for the preservation of that endangered species thought it was pretty
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