MICHAEL ISIKOFF - A reporter with States News Service in Washington,D.C., he has covered the Alton locks and dam issue for The Alton Telegraph and Lindsay-Schaub newspapers, among others.

Barge fees approved; environmental issue unresolved Logjam breaking up at Alton locks and dam THE NAVIGATION facility Illinois politicians like to proclaim as "more important than the Panama Canal" is located on the Mississippi River, 26 miles north of St. Louis, outside the town of Alton.

During harvest, when the grain barges fill the river, the two-hour process of dividing the huge, 1,000-foot long barge to fit the creaky, leak-ridden 600-foot Alton locks backs up the barges for miles, creating delays of up to 18 hours, sometimes longer.

The modern river is dredged, dammed and tamed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to maintain a nine-foot deep channel for commercial barge traffic. The coal and petroleum barges head north for the industrial centers of Chicago and Minneapolis. The grain barges make their way south to New Orleans, export bound.

Watching these "river traffic jams" does little to explain why the 40-year-old Locks and Dam No. 26 should have created a major uproar in the nation's capital. But Congress has finally taken action that reverses nearly 200 years of federal policy on the waterways and, it has been argued, will fundamentally reshape the nation's transportation future.

The legal and legislative battle over building a new and bigger Locks 26 to accommodate those 1,000-foot long barge tows has been going on for well over four years.

The present structure has been called a dangerous "bottleneck," threatening river transportation throughout the entire Mississippi River Basin, and the proposal to replace it has been called the "opening wedge" in a Corps plan to quadruple barge traffic on the Mississippi. Opponents of the plan contend that creating a Mississippi River "superhighway" will destroy the river's eco-structure and drive so much business away from midwestern railroads they will be driven into bankruptcy.

Each side exaggerates, but the battle goes on. A lawsuit filed in federal court in 1974 is still blocking construction of a new Alton locks and dam and, as of this writing, there is no sign it will be resolved any time soon.

Nevertheless, Congress took a widely heralded step toward resolving the issue last October when it passed the

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Inland Waterways Revenue Act of 1978. (As sometimes happens in the closing days of the legislative session, this major piece of legislation was an amendment to an obscure measure exempting certain nonprofit bingo operators from taxation.) The measure authorizes the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a new 1,200-foot long locks and dam at Alton, two miles downstream from the present facility, at a cost of $421 million.

But Congress went further with the legislation than either the Corps or its barge industry clients dreamed of when they first started promoting a new Alton barge facility nearly a decade ago. Starting on October 1, 1980, barge operators who use the locks must pay a 4-cent per gallon federal tax on the diesel fuel their towboats burn. The tax will gradually escalate to 10 cents by 1985. The proceeds will be tunneled into a new "Inland Waterways Trust Fund," similar to the Highway Trust Fund, that will pay an unspecified portion of the cost of future waterways projects such as Locks and Dam 26.

It is the first time in U.S. history that commercial interests will have to pay to use the waterways, thereby reversing the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which proclaimed the inland waterways "common highways and forever free," and it is the first time that the beneficiaries of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' waterworks must help pay for them.

Not surprisingly, the act was described as "historic" by Assistant Secretary of Transportation Terry Bracy, a principal architect of the legislation. Rep. Paul Findley (R., Pittsfield) called it a "major breakthrough .... Those who for years have thought the barges have been getting away with murder, ought to rejoice."

Critics block bill

In fact, there was little rejoicing among the barge industry's critics, and the most ardent were actively seeking to block passage of the bill right up until the final vote. These critics were the railroads which have long pushed for a user fee on the grounds that it is unfair to allow their barge competitors to use the rivers free while they build their own roadbeds and pay property taxes on it to boot.

However strange it may have seemed, notoriously pro-railroad congressman Fred Rooney (D., Penn.) who is chairman of the House Transportation and Commerce Subcommittee, stood in the doorway to the House chamber last October, pleading for the defeat of a tax on the railroads' competitors. The reasons were not hard to discern among those familiar with the legislation's history.

Seventeen months earlier, Secretary of Transportation Brock Adams had proclaimed the Carter administration's policy on this issue before the Senate Water Resources subcommitee: Waterway users should pay the full cost of federal expenditures to operate and maintain the waterways and most of the cost of new water projects.

"It is simply not equitable, not just, that profit-making businesses should have this much of their costs met by the American taxpayer," Adams said. The Corps of Engineers' proposal to build a new Locks 26 was not justified, at least not at that time, according to Adams. He recommended that the project

Locks create a river stairway LOCKS and Dam No. 26 is so named because it is the 26th of 29 locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi that have tranformed the river into a series of navigation pools for commercial barge traffic. Although barge tows vary in size and shape, the standard on the Upper Mississippi is a 1,000-foot long configuration of 15 flat-bottomed barges, three across and five long, pushed by a diesel-fueled towboat.To keep these enormous barges from foundering on the river bottom, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredges the river to maintain a uniform river depth of nine feet. But the river flows downhill: The total "drop" from St. Paul, Minn., to Granite City, 111., is 420 feet. The dams back up water at strategic points along the river, creating a descending staircase of "pools" or "lakes" for the barges. The locks raise or lower the barges and towboats from one water level to the next. All this has the effect of turning the river into something very different from what it was when Mark Twain's steamboats traveled the Mississippi in the first half of the 19th century.

should be temporarily shelved for further study and engineering experiments. Adams said that if Congress insisted on authorizing the proposals at that time, the bill would be vetoed unless accompanied by a waterways fee as the President was recommending.

This was strong stuff, and those who "for years have thought the barges have been getting away with murder" really did have reason to rejoice. Presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt had tried to impose user fees on the waterways; I one count, there had been 14 separated federal studies and reports recommending user fees since 1939. Yet each effort had been doomed virtually from the start for two reasons: the enorrnous political clout of the barge lobby and the part water projects had long played in the Capitol Hill "pork barrel" system.

Now, however, by "holding hostage" a water project that was proclaimed by the bargemen to be the most vital and urgently needed in the nation, it seemed that Jimmy Carter really did have a chance to enact fundamental waterways reform. The strategy appeared to work. On June 22, 1977, the Senate passed a bill artfully engineered by Sen. Pete Domenici (R., N.M.) that would authorize building a new Locks and Dam 26 coupled with almost precisely the waterways fee which the President wanted. The fee would be a user charge phased-in over 10 years, that would recover all of federal operations and maintenance costs plus half the construction costs on the waterways.

From that highpoint, thought, the proponents of waterways fees watched with dismay as Congress — and the administration — steadily backtraced in the face of one of the most furious lobbying assaults of the legislative session. The Senate bill was quickly killed in the House, which passed instead Locks 26 legislation containing¦ 6-cent phased-in fuel tax, aptly termed "joke" by Rep. Abner J. Mikva (D., Evanston).

By the time the scene shifted back to the Senate last May, the administration had retrenched. The Carter administitration declared its "minimum acceptable" fee to be 10 per cent of future construction projects. An amendment to that effect was introduced by Domenici and Sen. Adiai Stevenson (D., 111.), who is probably the Senate's most enthusiastic advocate of the new locks and dam.

The barge lobby, captained by Sen.

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Russell Long(D., La.), opposed the amendment and it lost. Secretary Adams immediately told a reporter, "It's too bad because this means ther will be no Lock and Dam 26 and no waterway user fees" because the President was going to veto the bill. Adams told another reporter several days later that if Carter didn't veto the bill, he would resign from the cabinet.

Farmers join industry

That appeared to conclude the matter as far as the 95th Congress was concerned. But Adams underestimated the .groundswell of congressional support for Locks and Dam 26. And there was pressure building to do something partly as a consequence of the campaign organized by a group called the National Committee on Locks and Dam 26. Cleverly applying farm group pressure on key senators and congressmen, the National Committee repretsented itself as speaking for a broad coalition of farmers, labor unions, electric and rural co-ops plus small independent barge lines which were all dependent on reliable river transportation. In fact, the committee's $350,000 campaign — replete with computerized mass mailings, instant petitions, slick pamphlets and all the other paraphernalia of modern Washington lobbying— was almost entirely financed by giant energy, industrial and grain-exporting conglomerates like U.S. Steel, Mobil Oil, Peabody Coal, Dow Chemical, pargill and Archer Daniels Midland at owned barge subsidiaries. These were the groups with the biggest economic stake in promoting a new Alton lock which would expand barge traffic on the river system. They were also the groups most vehemently opposed to a stiff waterways fee.

In addition, there was another factor that was bending the administration despite Adams' seemingly unequivocal words. As one environmentalist put it, "The people in DOT [Department of Transportation] were more interested in being able to say the Carter administration was the first to get the barges to pay something than they were in the principle that waterway users pay waterway costs." During the summer a watered- down waterways bill — weaker than the version Adams said would be vetoed — was accepted by Adams' deputies in negotiations with Long. This was the bill Bracy would later call "historic."

The indefatigable Sen. William Proxmire (D., Wisc.) was one of the few in the Congress who continued to speak out. Proxmire had once bestowed his monthly Golden Fleece Award for the most "ridiculous" waste of the taxpayers' money on the Corps for proposing Locks and Dam 26. Just as Long was about to slip the compromise onto the bingo bill late on the evening of October 9, Proxmire objected. The next day, he said the fuel tax, when compared to the enormous $500 million-a-year "free ride" provided the commercial barge industry, was "so low as to be almost pathetic." The trust fund would no more restrain capital expenditures on the waterways than the Highway Trust Fund has tamed the highway lobby. Proxmire's protestations aside, the new compromise cruised through the Senate by voice vote and the House by a 277-123 roll call vote. President Carter quickly signed the bill into law at a formal ceremony in a Minneapolis auditorium designed to boost the ticket of the Democratic Farm Labor Party ticket.

Carter releases 'hostage'

To supporters and critics alike, the new law will have a lasting effect on transportation policy. Assistant Secretary Bracy argues that the fear of depleting the new Waterways Trust Fund will restrain barge companies from demanding more and more locks and dams and canals, thereby averting boondoggles such as the $2.4 billion Tennessee-Tonbigbee Waterway.

But most environmental groups believe, like Proxmire, that the long-range effect of the law will be to continue a "mostly free ride" for the barges in perpetuity, while the trust fund confers a legitimacy on future projects they would otherwise not have. "The trust fund will be a catalyst for building new projects, such as the $2 billion Trinity River Canal in Texas or the Kaskaskia River expansion in Illinois," says John Marlin, executive director of the Urbana-based Coalition on American Rivers.

According to the environmentalists' analysis, by releasing the "hostage" Locks and Dam 26 for so little, the Carter administration kicked away the best chance in a generation to enact fundamental waterways reform.

In the minds of Stevenson and others who supported the new locks and dam and the "principle" of waterway user fees, the administration's retreat was more than justified by the urgency of the situation at Alton. Stevenson argued during the closing days of debate that the entire economy of the Midwest was "jeopardized" by further delay on the new locks since it will take from eight to ten years to build. Stevenson's argument, if true, constitutes a strong case for unhinging the link between the dam and the broader issue of waterways reform.

However, the only recent federal study of Locks and Dam 26 issued by the Department of Transportation in March 1977 stated there was no immediate economic need for new locks and dam. Moreover, a second DOT study in 1977, triggered by a General Accounting Office (GAO) report in October 1976, which stated that an

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alternative solution could probably be found for less than half the cost of a new structure, was still underway when Congress acted.

But the 1977 DOT report was completely ignored during the final days of congressional debate on Locks and Dam 26, and a followup study for an alternative solution was still underway when Congress acted. The 1977 DOT report said: "As a matter of economics, there is no requirement for early action on a 1,200-foot lock. Review of the traffic projections and of the capacity question leads to the conclusion that existing capacity [at Locks and Dam 26] will suffice at least until 1990. The whole question of capacity on the waterway system should be the subject of a major and extensive study of the whole system. There is ample time in which to conduct such a study."

Project snagged in court on environmental issue IN AUGUST 1974, U.S. District Judge Charles Richey set off the fireworks that culminated in the 1978 federal waterways act. In 1974, Judge Richey ordered an injunction barring the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from beginning construction of a new Locks and Dam 26 at Alton on the Mississippi River. The case is still before the court and it could take years to resolve. In fact, the threat that litigation could delay construction of the new lock indefinitely was a prime fear of pro-barge lawmakers even as the authorizing legislation was clearing its final congressional hurdles. Given the tenaciousness of Rick Brown, a lawyer for the environmental groups and midwestern railroads which launched the suit, and the apparent sympathies of Judge Richey, the fear was well-founded. There were two issues on which Richey based his original landmark opinion blocking the project: 1) lack of congressional authorization and 2) an inadequate environmental impact statement (EIS) which failed to examine the "system-wide" impact of the new barge facility, according to the judge. The first issue was resolved by the passage of the 1978 bill. It is the second issue that is the crux of the case. The Corps has long contended that Locks and Dam 26 is a single project; the railroads and environmentalists contend the project is but the first step in a massive scheme to deepen the navigation channel and expand other locks and dams upstream, paving the way fora dramatic increase in barge traffic. Since the 1974 injunction, the Corps has scaled down its original proposal from two 1,200 locks at Alton to one and has submitted a revised EIS, as required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). "I've said many times," Richey recently told a reporter, "if Congress wants to get this case out of my courtroom, all it has to do is pass a bill exempting this project from NEPA. But until they do ... ." On October 4, Richey handed down his latest opinion in the case, calling for an "evidentiary hearing" (the equivalent of a trial) where the remaining issues "in dispute" are to be spelled out. First and foremost of remaining issues was the absence of a "systematic analysis" of the impact of building a new series of big barge facilities like the Alton locks upstream on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Other issues mentioned by Judge Richey include the plaintiffs claim of "erroneous and unsupported calculation" by the Corps of cost-benefit ratio and projected traffic increases from a new locks and dam and an "insubstantial discussion of alternatives to the proposed project," such as a comparable federal investment in railroad improvements. Although Richey set an early date fora "status call" on the groundrules for the hearing, the case quickly lapsed into its glacier-like pace. A lawyer for the Justice; Department could not make the status call because of another commitment, the plaintiffs wanted to file new material, the government signalled their intention to file a new motion to dismiss, the plaintiffs asked for the opportunity to respond — and the hearing has been pushed back at least until February or March. Ironically, some impartial observer feel the government, for the first time, has a solid case to win the suit. Congress included in the waterways bill a section directing the Upper Mississippi Basin Commission to prepare a "master plan for the Upper Mississippi baIancing economic and environmental needs. The plan is to be submitted for congressional approval by January 1, 1982. Until then, the Corps is specifically barred from deepening the Mississippi's channel and from building any new locks and dams upstream that would expand barge traffic capacity. That language would appear to negate the need for a "system-wide" EIS. As Justice Department lawyer Fred Disheroon notes, "Now there can't be any expansion unless there is a violation of the law." But Disheroon is not optimistic. "No," he says, "not with Judge Richey."

Although bitterly criticized by economists hired by the National Committee on Locks and Dam 26 and other barge interests, the DOT report was not noticeably one-sided. It did not completely reject the Corps of Engineers replacement proposal nor did it conclude that construction of a 1,200-foot locks and dam at Alton would cut into railroad revenues by diverting existing rail traffic to the barges. The DOT report concluded that the Alton project would not generate pressure to expand other locks and dams on the Mississippi to turn it into a "superhighway" for barges.

DOT reports on project

The report, however, did sink some of the basic arguments floated by supporters of the project. The Corps and barge industry had argued, in essence that Locks 26 is a "bottleneck" with traffic jams because it is unable to efficiently handle the present level barge traffic on the river, and it would become even more inadequate as river traffic increases.

According to DOT, river traffic would not increase by 25 to 30 per cent by 1985 as estimated by the Corps. For example, the Corps projected that coal traffic through Alton would near double by 1985, from 5.2 million tons 10.2 million tons annually. DOT noted however, that almost all of the coal moved through Alton by barge was high-sulfer eastern coal for Midwestern utilities, and because of federal clean air standards, those utilities are likely in the future to rely more on low-sulfur western coal moved by rail.

A second finding by DOT which

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agreed with reports by independent consultants, was that the implementation of simple "operational improvements" at Alton could significantly cut time delays. Currently, there is no incentive for the barge operators to push for such improvements because management costs for the dam are paid by the taxpayer rather than the barge operators.

But were these operational improvements to be implemented, DOT said the overall tonnage capacity of Locks and Dam 26 could be "prudently" estimated to jump to 75 to 85 million tons annually, compared to the 57 million tons which currently pass through annually.

A taste of how the barge companies feel about improvements came last year when the Corps, partly in response to the DOT recommendations, ordered improvements. One was a requirement that towboats waiting in line to transit the locks must help move barges of other tows passing through the lock. The Inland Oil and Transport Co. of Brentwood, Mo., promptly filed suit alleging that the Corps' order was in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment (the constitutional prohibition of slavery).

Corps still testing

While Congress ignored the 1977 ROT report, it didn't even wait for the results of ongoing Corps of Engineers "engineering and field test" experiments prompted by the 1976 GAO report. What was under study was a proposal by the Illinois Department of Transportation to repair the existing Alton dam and to construct a new 200-foot steel sheet pile lock through the center of the locks. According to the GAO, the proposal "is a feasible approach to maintaining navigation [at Alton] for an additional 50 years." GAO said the cost of this proposal would be $182.6 million, or less than half the pricetag on the Corps' proposal to build a completely new structure.

To pursue the alternative proposal, the Carter administration last year asked for — and got — $15 million for the Corps to conduct an extensive series of engineering tests at Alton to determine if the admittedly experimental nature of the techniques recommended by Illinois DOT would work. While Congress and the administration wrangled over user fees, the tests continued under the supervision of the Corps' St. Louis District Office and a special task force within U.S. DOT.

The results of this two-year, multi- million dollar study were due by March 1979, but the study was thrown into doubt when Congress passed the waterways bill. The Corps didn't even want to finish the study. Late in November, the Corps prepared a "position paper" for the Office of Management and Budget arguing that it was no longer necessay to reach a conclusion on the cheaper Illinois DOT alternative since, as one St. Louis Corps District official put it, "Congress has already told us to build the new dam."

Epitaph

It has been a touchy issue for the Carter administration and the Congress. Both branches of government have invested a great deal of energy lately in preaching the virtues of fiscal austerity. Waste in government, federal boondoggles, cost overruns and assorted other examples of unnecessary spending have been attacked by politicians seeking to soothe an electorate inflamed over high taxes and runaway inflation. But in the case of Locks and Dam 26, Congress and the administration, under political pressure, authorized a $421 million project (most experts believe the final price will be well over one-half billion dollars) without waiting to see if the exact same objective could have been accomplished for a fraction of the cost. The epitaph for the debate over the Alton Locks and Dam might well have been spoken by that lonely holdout, Proxmire. "We may be hoping to buy improved transportation on the Mississippi," he said the day the waterways bill cleared the Senate, "but we are selling the taxpayers down the river." 

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