Army Corps Cooks Books to Justify Billion Dollar Project on Mississippi

(13 February, 2000 ? Washington) According to Environmental Defense, an Army Corps of Engineers economist has filed an explosive affidavit with the U.S. Government’s Office of Special Counsel. The affidavit details an aggressive, year-long effort by top Corps officials to ignore and distort its own economic analysis in order to justify spending $1 billion for expanded barging on the Upper Mississippi River. The Office of Special Counsel is an independent agency that supervises investigations of wrongdoing exposed by federal employees. Biologists believe that more barging would further the decline of the Mississippi River system and its more than 200,000 acres of wildlife refuges. The affidavit and other documents obtained by Environmental Defense can be found at www.environmentaldefense.org on the web.

At issue is a seven-year, $50 million study by the Corps to determine whether doubling the size of many locks on the upper Mississippi River to speed barges would be economically justified. Congress requires a positive economic analysis before authorizing new projects.

“Because navigation projects come at great cost to the environment and to taxpayers, it is critical that they at least be justified by an impartial demonstration of important economic benefits,” said Tim Searchinger, an Environmental Defense attorney. “The affidavit and other documents show that top Army Corps officials were determined to tell Congress that the project was justified regardless of what their economists and engineers actually thought.”

The affidavit shows that in the spring of 1998, Corps economists concluded that expensive measures were not justified, regardless of environmental impacts. The Corps then had the economists replaced and its engineering and economic estimates changed until, one year later, the Corps was able to produce an analysis that would justify $1 billion in spending. These disclosures come only a few weeks before the Army Corps will release its full analysis of the project.

Another document made available to Environmental Defense suggests that such deliberate distortion may not be limited to this project. According to a memorandum describing a meeting last December of the top Corps’ officials from all states along the Mississippi River, project managers were “encouraged not to take no for an answer” when investigating new projects as a way of building up the Corps’ project list and budget.

The memorandum raises serious questions for environmentalists because this same Corps division is investigating whether to proceed with projects that would drain 100,000 to 200,000 acres of wetlands. It is also considering a separate navigation project along the White River that biologists say would cause grave harm to a wetland area that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has described as unlike any other in the U.S.

Environmental Defense, a leading national nonprofit organization based in New York, represents more than 300,000 members. Since 1967, we have linked science, economics, and law to create innovative, equitable, and cost-effective solutions to the most urgent environmental problems.