Engineer Memoirs
I would like to ask a follow-up question on the Section 404 program. In the court case,
Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. v. Callaway, the judge ordered the Corps in March
1975 to expand its definition of "navigable waters" and its Section 404 jurisdiction. Did the
Corps get much guidance from the Ford Administration at the time on how to implement this
court decision expanding jurisdiction?
Not unless you consider the Office of Management and Budget-an office within the
A:
Executive Branch. OMB carefully coordinated the EPA's and the Corps of Engineers'
programs.
We worked with EPA. As mentioned, our man was Brigadier General Ken McIntyre, then
deputy director of Civil Works. He did a great job on this. We had many meetings developing
Register. After review by OMB and publication,
draft procedures to announce in the
General McIntyre with EPA people conducted public hearings all over the country. Rebecca
Hamner represented EPA.
Ultimately, the hearings were finished, the regulations became official, and the procedures
were adopted. Those procedures have held up fairly well. There've been modifications
redefining the authority of both EPA and the Corps. The final "go" or "no-go" authority rests
with EPA, properly so, I think. My recollection is that the efforts of the Executive Branch to
implement that new law were thorough and involved many man hours over a rather long time.
So to answer your question directly, there was no strong guidance. The principal players-the
Corps, EPA, and OMB, particularly the Corps and EPA-formulated this process and then
went about the business of doing it. It worked.
I followed up on this because in some ways this period is pretty critical in the history of the
Corps from then till
A:
Yes.
-because the environmental programs become such a big and important activity.
A:
Well, you're right. It turned out, as I may have mentioned earlier, the Corps' load of only a
few thousand permits a year soon jumped to tens of thousands. The Corps showed up
wherever there was development in a wetland or navigable stream.
I don't think it's a job the Corps would have gone out and asked for, frankly, but it was
fortunate that the Corps got the job, in my opinion. We've taken a lot of heat over the years,
but the mission clearly emerged from the Corps' role in water issues and demonstrated its
ability to perform well in regulating and implementing the national objective in environmental
matters.
After a few years, the environmental community preferred that the Corps keep this
responsibility because it had done a good job and was fair. An alternative was to give the
whole thing to EPA, and it's my recollection that the public as a whole, and the environmental
community specifically, preferred the Corps to keep it.
This program gave the Corps a strong position in the growing national trend towards
environmental protection, and it continues to put the Corps on the proper side of the issue.
It meant quite a few internal changes to the Corps as well, didn't it? A lot of new disciplines
were brought in.
Well, NEPA did that earlier. The regulatory program had a tremendous impact on and
A:
increase in the O&M manpower situation and the need to train people to do things they hadn't
done before. The administration of the program became a very big challenge and subjected
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