Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
program or cut it in half, or whatever. The policy maker would write a policy that he thought
was going to save X amount of money. The policy was tough to write in executable terms
and the money never seemed to get saved.
Our problem was that by presenting the facts, we would be looked at askance with statements
being made like, "You're not supporting what I'm trying to do." Well, we were trying to be
very supportive. The problem was that that policy maker hadn't sought out the right
information in advance of his decision to get an understanding for what was achievable.
After you've been scrubbed several times by successive administrations, what's left to be
scrubbed? So, to make wise policy he ought to do his homework and then not shoot the
messenger when he brings the facts later. Homework is only effective when completed
before the answer is stated. Most people learn that in school.
The other issue had to do with tow traffic on our waterways. As part of the fiscal year 1983
budget drill, the administration said they could no longer afford to operate the waterways at
the same level of service without approval of cost recovery legislation--a drill to get the
barge industry to agree to user charges. As stated, the position was that without user fees
there were insufficient federal dollars, so we could only operate part of the system and would
close down certain parts of the system.
That was the drill, and it came about as the budget was being put together in the fall of '81
and then became part of the President's budget submitted to Congress in January of '82. To
us in the division--the USACE Civil Works staff may have had more direct involvement in
this beforehand--it came as a blast of frosty air on a warm night--a surprise, in other words.
It was just a pronouncement, "We're going to close these parts of the system."
We had had some staff input to verify numbers and that sort of thing, but it came out as an
abrupt announcement that, "We're going to stop and close down the navigation operations on
the upper Allegheny, the Monongahela, the Kanawha, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and
the Kentucky Rivers." Basically, in the Ohio River Division they were only going to leave
the main stem Ohio River locks operating.
After his announcement, the secretary asked us to prepare impacts and be prepared for
congressional testimony with impacts. We really did a lot of work addressing impacts. They
were sizeable--a millions of dollars hit to the economy. The decision reflected a not very
real understanding of the integral nature of the waterway infrastructure and the life and
economy in the Ohio Valley, for example. It's interwoven, and the Corps' role in operating
those systems is very integral to what's going on in all the river basins and the national
economy.
For example, closing the Allegheny River system as had been announced. Above Lock 4 or 5
on the Allegheny is a power station that supplies a great amount of power to part of
Pittsburgh and the area to the north of Pittsburgh. There's not a lot of coal goes through those
locks, but when you turn down that power station and you compute out how many trucks
have to go across the highways to get that coal up there, it's impractical.
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