John
Morris
ground. As you may recall, I mentioned when I was in Savannah District as deputy district
engineer, a couple of hours would take care of the permit applications for the month. Well,
we went from a handful of permits to tens of thousands almost instantaneously.
Section 404 referred to "waters of the United States." It didn't say, "dredgeand fill," it said,
"dredge or fill." So the effect of that was to extend in Nebraska alone the miles of streams
requiring permits tenfold. How to manage that program was a real challenge. How to tell the
public what it meant was a problem. Brigadier General Ken McIntyre became the deputy
director of Civil Works and managed these tasks.
He dealt in EPA with Chris Beck and Becky Hamner. Beck until recently was the chairman
of one of the largest environmental companies in the United States. Hamner left EPA in 1992
as administrator of water and went to France with an international group. We worked days to
draft a plan to implement the law. New regulations were published in the
Register
and public hearings were conducted throughout the country. Ken McIntyre did a tremendous
job in a series of public meetings by explaining what this was all about to the people.
Later, while the Corps' leadership was having a meeting out at the
Building, Locke
Mouton put out a notice saying every farmer would have to get a permit to plow ground.
Lester Edelman, the chief counsel for the House Public Works, called me up and asked, "Jack,
have you got a death wish over there?" He considered that was such a startling press release.
It may have been startling, but it was sure effective, because soon thereafter the law was
amended to exclude certain woodlands and farms.
This mission was such an expansive addition to the Corps' effort that we had difficulty
coping. One day-must have been
Gribble called me and said he just wasn't
happy with the 404 program, too many problems. He said it was my responsibility to do
something about it. I agreed.
I called Manning Seltzer, the general counsel, and explained that the problem "is not our lack
of ability to do things, it's our inability to understand better what we're supposed to do, so
you and I need to address this."Manning came up with the brilliant idea of having a national
meeting of all the district engineers and to review a series of preplanned case studies over a
three-day conference. We did it in New Orleans, Louisiana.
General Heiberg, then Colonel Heiberg, district engineer, arranged for us to use the new
Marriott Hotel on Canal Street. The meeting basically turned the Corps around. I say "turned
the Corps around." That's a bad way to put it. It educated the Corps. I remember the case
studies that came up. We don't need to take time with all of them here, but each was a
landmark event.
Al Costanza, district engineer, Wilmington, North Carolina, presented the Bald Head Island
issue. An applicant wanted a permit to build a dock to offload some equipment. Costanza
concluded he was not going to issue a permit until he learned the use of the equipment. The
applicant objected on the belief that all
required to do was to permit him to build a
dock. Well, this became the "nose of the camel decision" because it turned out that the district
did have a right to determine if the use of that dock was going to lead to environmental
destruction.
There was the Block M case down in Miami. Years earlier somebody had started a fill on
which to put a high-rise condominium as a retirement home. He'd stopped for some reason
when the top of the land was just below the water. Later, after NEPA, he applied for a permit
to continue the fill so he could erect the retirement home. The permit was denied because a
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