________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
Q:
Well, one of the ways you felt the impact at the Ohio River Division and throughout the
Corps was budget cutting and personnel cuts during the early years of the Reagan
administration. The size of the work force was cut back. According to the division history,
there were 301 O&M cuts in personnel by the end of 1982 and 157 the two years following
in engineering and support services areas.
A:
Oh, really.
Q:
Of course, divisionwide, that includes all the districts, I guess, which led you to speak out
about the problem or the need for retaining in-house capabilities for design as you were
getting more and more contracting. What was that doing to your ability?
A:
Those were focused--and this is by the end of '82 already?
Q:
Well, with O&M, in the O&M area. That's what it says.
A:
Again, it's how difficult it is to put what into what time frame as to when events happened.
One of the things that happened--there are several--was the Grace Commission. The
administration set the Grace Commission up to go investigate how things could be done
better throughout government. Then there were our own initiatives started down through the
secretary's office, and they sort of all blend together.
One of the things that we addressed was the notion that we needed to cut down the number of
folks in our recreation and parks area. By the time that surfaced, there also surfaced the
administration's feeling that there ought to be user fees, in some way, for the towing industry
to pay for navigation improvements. The administration's tactic was to put pressure on the
bottom end by just stating, "We're just not going to do all the things we used to do." So, they
cut funding in the O&M arena and in the recreation and parks arena.
These were programs where we had to submit ways we would cut back. There was always
the notion, common in the administration, that we should contract everything out instead of
doing it in-house. We had an ongoing dialogue as to how we could best do that, and we
approached all of those things from the standpoint of, with the new direction, how can we do
it?
The problem was that we always came up, rather abruptly, against numbers. The Corps is not
a big, overstaffed organization. When it comes to navigation, repairing locks and dams, there
aren't people out there that you just contract to come in and repair a lock. You can order a
new miter gate--there are some people who'll be happy to make you one over the next five
or six months.
However, the people who had the big barge derricks, the heavy-duty kind that could lift
heavy gates, was us--the Corps of Engineers. When a tow rams a gate, it is a time-sensitive
repair, and they were all different. You go out and dewater the lock. The Chief of Operations
gets down there and does a quick triage and really figures out what is needed to be done.
Then they manufacture and cut the steel, or bring another gate in, or do what's necessary.
Meanwhile, there is great pressure from the towing industry because we're talking hundreds
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