________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
position in the Ohio River Division, and so General Morris chose me to move there. Those
actions took place in, I guess, about the AugustSeptember time frame of 1980. Therefore, I
only stayed a short time in Civil Works as the deputy director and moved in January of '81 to
Cincinnati and took command.
My transition was rather steep because our testimony before the House Energy and Water
Resources Committee took place about three weeks after I took command and I was faced
early on with the requirement to testify before the committee in February.
Of course, I knew about it in advance, so I had flown to Cincinnati twice on brief, get-
acquainted visits. We had talked a little bit about the testimony process and how they were
laying it out. Testimony preparation was the intensive part of my first three weeks in the
Ohio River Division.
In addition, another important thing for a new division commander is to get around to meet
various congressional and other state interests that you support. Before I left Washington, I
called on the ones who were pertinent to the upcoming testimony. They were Congressman
Bevill, Congressman Whitten, and Congressman Myers from Indiana, who was always
interested because his district was in the division area.
Because we had responsibilities for the TennTom, both Bevill and Whitten were very key
and interested in those activities. In addition, I called on Senator Byrd because of his interest
in the Section 202 program and all our projects in West Virginia.
Within the division, I had initial meetings with my district engineers, but I don't recall
getting out very much the first three weeks because of the intensity of the testimony
preparation. Basically, the testimony statement and backups had already been prepared. I had
some input into the statement of that, but not so much as in the years to come where I could
take charge of the process earlier.
I was basically taking what there was and becoming acquainted with it. In the Ohio River
Division there were district mock hearings, which they had done for years. Each district
engineer would come in to the division headquarters with staff and testify to us, the division
staff and me, on their programs.
They would use slides, and we would go through our budget book with all of the things we
had submitted up through USACE and on over to Hunter Spillan and the committee staff.
We would go through the pages; the division staff would ask questions of the district
engineer and the district staff. We would try to ask the tough questions that we anticipated
we would get during the congressional hearing.
That was a very valuable process and gave me a good stem-to-stern view of everything that
was going on in the Ohio River Division. Of course, there were a lot of details. There were
five or six pages for each project, and so a lot of it I couldn't absorb for the long term, but I
did get used to the process and how to find things in the book. I also got to meet the district
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