Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
of thousands of dollars a day for every delay when they can't get through a lock and the
system shuts down.
We went through all kinds of numbers drills. "You need four crews, one for each district.
Can't you get by with just one in the whole Ohio? What's the right answer? Can't you cut
them down? Justify each and every last person."
Once we had gone through that drill, we started to come to the conclusion that we were about
where we needed to be. We could cut a few people out of the grass-cutting crew and let that
be contracted out--if there were grass-cutting crews.
With the parks and recreation mission, our rangers, it was a little different. It varied by state.
Some states, like Indiana, the state's Department of Natural Resources ran all of our areas
and we didn't have rangers there doing the recreation part. In other places, like Ohio or down
in Tennessee, we would have them and we would staff all aspects of the mission.
So, when you want to cut in a place like Indiana's Brookfield Lake, we would only have two
or three people on site who really were there to operate the flood control project and had
nothing to do with the multirecreational facilities at the lake. The state took care of that.
When you only have three people there for a round-the-clock operation, then how do you
cut? All areas got lumped together and seemed to be a lucrative opportunity. With two or
three per site, how do you cut?
We developed a list of things we could cut, and we tried to close places. Of course, for every
closure we ran into the realities. There would be a public reaction through local and
congressional interests about not cutting back, which would come swinging around the loop.
Our expression would be, "The recreation area is not well-used. We need to cut the budget,
and we can't afford to run them all. We're going to operate the ones that are most effective
and serve the most people."
Out of that kind of process came the cut in the operations personnel that you mentioned. We
did get quite a number of cuts and parceled them around as best we could.
My concern about cutting into our professional capability came later. It was always difficult
to say who was cutting what. We knew the Office of Management and Budget passed cut
numbers down to USACE, and there the Director of Civil Works really figured out, based on
workload levels, what the allocation should be to different organizations.
Q:
Right.
A:
So, a lot of our debate was with Bory Steinberg, who ran civil works programs at the time--
how they analyzed our work versus somebody else's. Our thoughts were that certain things
were not being computed correctly. So, it was hard for me to determine if all of those might
be administration driven, except for the ongoing drills to reduce navigation and recreation.
Of course, Bory Steinberg's answer was, "I get the numbers from the Office of Management
and Budget, so I have to pass the shortages and cuts somewhere." My response to them was,
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