Who Owns The River?

By MARK THOMPSON

Nature loves the rhythm of a meandering river, with the summertime droughts and spring floods that nurture wildlife and push a waterway down a new path. Commercial barges, however, demand constancy, in the form of a canal filled with enough water to keep their 9-ft.-deep hulls from running aground. So after the great 1927 flood, the Army Corps of Engineers began shackling the unruly current. The corps built levees along the river's banks to hold in the water and turned its rapids and ever changing sandbars into a more civilized staircase of 29 locks and dams stretching nearly 700 miles from St. Paul, Minn., to St. Louis, Mo. Now the upper Mississippi has become a chain of placid pools, each deep enough to allow barges calm passage before a lock lowers them toward New Orleans.

But today there is congestion on this part of the river. The locks are too small to handle its 1,200-ft., 15-barge tows, and so they must be broken in half to go through the lock and then reassembled on the other side. "You want to keep moving all the time," explains Captain Dennis Drury over the thrum of his boat's diesel engine as he slowly pushes more than two acres of barges carrying 20,000 tons of corn into a narrow lock at Winfield, Mo. "But you can sit here for a day and a half waiting on your turn to lock." So the corps wants to build seven new 1,200-ft. chambers--double the length of the current locks--at a cost of $1.2 billion. And with the 400,000 jobs its Mississippi dams and locks provide, with its $4 billion annual budget, with its history of helping build the Capitol and the Panama Canal, and with the 12,000 miles of channels it now controls across America, the corps, you would think, will get what the corps wants. Politicians have always made sure of that.

This time, though, a man named Don Sweeney got in the way. Sweeney, a civilian economist with the corps for 22 years, was asked to head a team to justify the cost of the new locks. He found that they would not be needed until 2040 and that any slowdowns would simply force shippers to shift to railroads or trucks. Sweeney's military bosses were not pleased, he alleges, and they booted him off the panel in 1998. "They told me to get the answer they wanted, or I'd be gone," says Sweeney. Then they used corps-friendly numbers, he says, to show that the added efficiencies of the bigger locks would justify their cost. In February, Sweeney complained to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which investigates the charges of whistle-blowers. The agency, after examining the facts, agreed there was a "substantial likelihood" that corps officials illegally wasted funds, and it referred the case to Defense Secretary William Cohen for further investigation. (The lock study has cost $54 million since 1993.) Corps headquarters has characterized Sweeney's charges as "very troubling" and has pledged to root out any wrongdoing. In addition to the Pentagon, Congress and the National Academy of Sciences are looking into Sweeney's allegations. Despite the probes, the corps hopes to justify the bigger locks by year's end and seek money from Congress to build them.

The justification for building bigger locks is simple: time is money. Supporters, including farmers and such commodity heavyweights as Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and ConAgra, say the time saved on a trip down the river could generate an extra nickel or dime of profit on every $2 bushel of corn floating down the Mississippi. "I produce about 100,000 bushels of grain a year, and 5[cents] on each one is a pretty good chunk of change that goes straight to my bottom line," says Gregory Guenther of Belleville, Ill. The river, 22 miles from his 1,000-acre farm, is transportation for all the corn and soybeans grown on his land.

But fiscal conservatives dislike the federal subsidy the barges receive. They say any savings will benefit the barge companies, not the farmers. And environmentalists are concerned that bigger locks will bring more barges, killing more fish with their propellers and filling more backwaters with silt. "It's amazing how clear the river water is in the winter when barge season is over," says Dan Specht, who grows 800 acres of soybeans in McGregor, Iowa, four miles from the river. "The muddy water hurts plants by putting silt on their leaves, and it hurts fish with silt on their eggs."

That's the substance of the debate. But there's also the politics behind it. The corps's flow chart makes clear that civilians are supposed to be in charge, but in reality the outfit has pretty much been allowed to run itself under commander Joe Ballard, a three-star general. Sweeney's allegations spurred Army Secretary Louis Caldera to issue tougher guidelines in March re-asserting civilian control over the corps. But Caldera's efforts generated a rebuke from three senior Republican Senators: Robert Smith of New Hampshire, chairman of the Environment Committee; Ted Stevens of Alaska, who runs the Appropriations panel; and John Warner of Virginia, who heads the Armed Services Committee. The trio tersely told the Pentagon in April to leave the corps alone. Caldera's proposal, they said, could "compromise the professional and technical analysis performed by the corps."

The Pentagon backed down, but that wasn't good enough. In May, Stevens and Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico tacked a rider to a budget bill instructing the Pentagon's civilians to keep their hands off the corps. The lawmakers' defense of the status quo is no surprise. The corps spends millions of dollars every year in their states and immortalizes its congressional friends with locks and dams named for them. It is no coincidence that the corps's headquarters is not located in some corner of the Pentagon but sits at the foot of Capitol Hill. The rider's brazen language has irritated Caldera and other senior Pentagon civilians. "As the Secretary of the Army," Caldera says, "ultimately the responsibility for civilian oversight of the corps is mine." Sweeney puts it more bluntly. "The Senators say they don't want the process politicized, but that's the pot calling the kettle black," he says. "They don't mind civilian control of the corps so long as they're the civilians."