Theodore
That was a long-standing Corps' policy. Another Corps' policy was that if you
were dredging a new channel into a new area such as Portland Harbor in
Oregon where they had to dredge the Willamette River to allow ships to get up
to Portland, or the Houston ship channel, which was built to bring shipping up
into Houston where there was no existing channel, the policy was that local
districts or authorities, "local interests" is what the Corps calls them, had to
pay half of the costs. The Corps couldn't take money directly from an industry.
It would always have to be through some kind of a political body which was
authorized to do it. The local interests paid half of the costs for the initial
deepening of the Portland Harbor and also for the Houston ship channel when
they first started. I'm sure they did it on a lot of others.
So when General Lewis Pick sent up the report recommending deepening of the
Delaware River up to the
Works of U.S. Steel near Trenton, but on the
Pennsylvania side, he recommended that local interests pay half of the added
costs of dredging a
channel above Philadelphia because the ore carriers
were the only ships that needed more than
depth. I don't remember
whether it was 50 feet or 45 feet that was recommended.
But anyway, because you needed that extra feet of draft, the single user, in
this case the U.S. Steel Company, under the long-standing Corps' policy would
have to pay half. This, of course, would have to be done through the Delaware
River Port Authority, which would somehow arrange a way to tax U.S. Steel.
And that was the policy when the report came up in the Truman administration.
The report may have been cleared by the Bureau of the Budget during the
Truman administration, or it may have still been in the Bureau of the Budget.
All of these reports, would pile up while we were working on the budget in the
fall and didn't have time to review reports. I usually had a stack of reports on
the table in my office, because I was responsible for reviewing them for the
Bureau and writing comments back to the Corps. And the stack built up right
before the omnibus bill.
When the Eisenhower administration came into office in 1953 all of the project
reports, including the upper Delaware, were sent back for review, and my
recollection is that the Corps reiterated the recommendation for local cost
sharing under the single user policy. I don't remember exactly the timing of
this but it must have been in 1954.
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