Improving the Grade on Water Resources Infrastructure
Publication: Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 8, Issue 4
Abstract
Although many of the practices and procedures that guide the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Civil Works Program are well established and proven, there are too many other practices within Congress, the executive branch, and the USACE that are archaic and counterproductive. These practices do a disservice to the taxpayer without enhancing the built environment or the natural environment. If there ever was any doubt about the risk posed to the public by inferior water resources infrastructure, and the importance of the program to our economic and environmental well-being, I believe that Hurricane Katrina dispelled it. I provide recommendations to improve our twenty-first century water resources infrastructure through the development of a national water policy, revision of the Principles and Guidelines, improvements to funding mechanisms, and better management of the Civil Works Program and the USACE. I also incorporate some of the infrastructure planning lessons from Hurricane Katrina.
The Army Civil Works Program is the closest thing we have to a national water resources infrastructure program. The authority for federal involvement in water resources infrastructure is an outgrowth of the commerce clause in the U.S. Constitution. There is little dispute that the Founding Fathers intended that the federal government should build certain infrastructure. Benjamin Franklin even suggested that Congress should have the “power to provide for cutting canals where deemed necessary.” The American Founders rejected this specific enumeration on the grounds that the power to regulate trade already assumed such powers (Meese 2005, p. 119). Constitutionally, the role of the federal government in water resource infrastructure projects is based on almost two centuries of precedent.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) was first made responsible for river improvements in 1824 when Congress appropriated funds for snag removal on the Ohio and lower Mississippi rivers in the first of many river and harbor bills. Funds for other such projects and for the maintenance and improvements of channels followed. Also in 1824, the Supreme Court had ruled in Gibbons v. Ogden that federal authority covered interstate commerce including riverine navigation (USACE 2008).
The Army Civil Works Program is a separate appropriation from the Department of Defense budget. Yet, one of the main reasons that the Army has historically been responsible for water infrastructure is to maintain a military engineering capability (i.e., for training), and not because infrastructure is directly related to defense or national security. It is not a coincidence that many of the Army’s engineer leaders in World War II had cut their teeth on water resources projects in the 1930s (Galloway 1974). Military engineering organizations are so expensive and require such specialized training that it is impractical to maintain them solely as a military capability in peacetime. The other option, not having them available in wartime, can be catastrophic. Contractors cannot be expected to function effectively or efficiently in hostile environments. A 1974 Army War College study summed up the rationale for retaining the civil works mission within the Army on the basis of the following two reasons among others:
1.
There is considerable value to the Defense establishment in having a major engineering organization in-being, not “charged” to Defense but in continuous liaison with Army elements. The capability for rapid conversion from civil to military missions has been visibly demonstrated on many occasions . . . (Galloway 1974, pp. 75-76).
2.
The training value to the key personnel of the civil works assignments is enormous and is fully supported by senior officials within and without the USACE. This program is a vital aspect of USACE executive development activities (Galloway 1974, pp. 75-76).
Spurred by economic development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the response to devastating floods and the Great Depression, the Army Civil Works Program grew to five percent of the federal budget before World War II. It remained two percent of the federal budget in the post-World War II era. A significant portion of this growth was a New Deal attempt to promote economic development by investing in infrastructure (Coll et al. 1958). Civil Works expanded from navigation into flood control and then hydroelectric power, water supply, and recreation—in short into almost every aspect of water resources. The program remained strong even as the cold war, the Vietnam War, and the Great Society exploded the size of the federal government in the 1960s. The Congress, industry, and the public seemed enamored of the new reservoirs, of reassuring levees, of the constantly improving ports and waterways, and of the cheap hydroelectric power built by a competent USACE.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, environmentalists and those looking to balance the budget—so-called “budget hawks”—began to attack the program relentlessly. They made the USACE a poster child for excessive development, environmental neglect, and big government. In some ways, the program had become a victim of its own success. The USACE arguably had built the finest water resources infrastructure in the world to that point in time, with superb inland navigation, robust flood protection, abundant water supply, and even surplus hydroelectric power. Americans could, and did, take this infrastructure for granted for decades. Today the program is almost negligible, less than 0.2 percent in a $3.0 trillion federal budget (Wooley and Shabman 2007). This funding level is hardly adequate to operate and maintain the existing infrastructure base, never mind implementing necessary modernization, expansion, and long overdue environmental mitigation and restoration.
In 2005, ASCE’s Report Card for America’s Infrastructure gave our water resource infrastructure grades of D- and D (ASCE 2005). Hurricane Katrina has underscored this poor rating and significantly tarnished the program’s reputation. Far from contributing to a constructive dialogue on improving our water infrastructure, many environmentalists and budget hawks continue to whittle away at the program ignoring both the new USACE mission of environmental restoration and the agency’s long record of outstanding stewardship of federal dollars. Symptomatic of the lack of consensus on a direction for national water policy was the gridlock over the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA). It took Congress seven years (versus a two-year norm) to produce a consensus bill that passed over the president’s veto, although the bill included popular and necessary projects such as Everglades restoration and Louisiana hurricane protection (Water Resources Development Act 2007). The WRDA, however, is a hollow victory because it only authorizes and does not fund work. The problem is simply moved to another congressional committee that will only be able to fund a few select projects. The net result is an infamous backlog of tens of billions of dollars of civil works projects.
The Army Civil Works Program probably hit its low point with Hurricane Katrina. Following a major scandal over the economic justification for enlarging and modernizing locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi River in the late 1990s and the firing of an assistant secretary of the Army over budget issues in 2002, the program was on a downward trajectory when Katrina highlighted problems in designing and constructing critical infrastructure. The negative publicity from these events always seemed to focus on the USACE as an institution while ignoring the lack of a national water policy and the federal government’s inability to plan and finance infrastructure development in a coherent way. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the failure of a succession of different administrations and Congresses led by both parties (Wooley and Shabman 2007). The bright spot in Hurricane Katrina was that the leadership of the USACE was determined to identify and address all the problems. In a remarkable period of self-examination, supported by the civil engineering community, Lieutenant General Carl Strock left no stone unturned to find out what had gone wrong. This suggests that issues within the USACE will be fixed but leaves open the question of whether or not national policy will address larger issues outside the USACE before our once world-class water resources infrastructure begins to resemble the third world.
What Reform?
National Water Policy
•
Add 10 million wetland acres?
•
flood protection?
•
What navigation system?
Revise Principles and Guidelines
•
Sustainable development.
Improve funding
•
Increase funding;
•
Fund projects not years; and
•
Accountable project managers
Management of Civil Works
•
Leader development;
•
Contracting; and
•
No more Katrinas.
During the unrelenting attacks on the USACE over the last decade, there have been frequent calls to reform the agency. The so-called reformers attributed almost superhuman political power to the USACE, which they said created large projects that destroyed the environment and wasted taxpayer dollars just to keep busy or to get its generals promoted. The “reformers” seemed to ignore the role that Congress, and congressional earmarks, played in demanding and funding projects, not to mention the requests from constituents that generally initiated the projects. They also seemed to forget that there were legitimate requirements for water resources infrastructure. USACE reform as a slogan is a red herring. It has masked the real problems in our water resources development policy. Instead of focusing on minor changes to practices within USACE, we need to reform how federal, state, and local governments view water resources, identify needs, and build necessary infrastructure while enhancing our natural environment. We need a national water policy.
National Water Policy
Our water resources infrastructure must be managed on a watershed basis following the principles of sustainable development. Sustainable development is still development and significantly, it will mean either spending more on this infrastructure or shutting it down to avert more catastrophes like Katrina; as communities and industries expand into areas supported by aging infrastructure or no infrastructure, the risk of failure increases dramatically. Loss of productivity in inland navigation, reduced water supplies, and increased flooding will occur if we do not invest in improvements in our water resources infrastructure. Further improvements in water quality are unlikely if we do not restore our wetlands and implement true watershed planning. The environmental community and the budget hawks never seem to mention these issues, perhaps because they are content to obstruct any kind of development.
Civil engineers must become leaders in water resources infrastructure at the national level and help build a consensus on needs and opportunities based on sound science and good engineering. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cannot dictate a national water policy that establishes how the nation views critical infrastructure, but they can certainly execute that policy once it is established. For forty years, the dominant national theme in civil works (i.e., in water resources infrastructure) has been negative: stop environmental damage, stop development, and stop spending. However, this ignores the fact that our infrastructure is part of the ecosystem and the civilization in which we live and work. Civil engineers harmonize the built environment with the natural environment to create a better world. Rational spending means an investment in the natural and built environment. Our national leaders need to articulate a new positive vision to use the Civil Works Program to improve both the natural and the built environment, spend wisely, and invest in our water resources infrastructure for the future. A national water policy ought to address wetlands, flood protection, and navigation.
The National Research Council (1992) has recommended the addition of 10 million acres of wetlands in the continental United States. When we lose wetlands, we lose their ability to provide clean water, prevent floods, and enhance biological diversity. It has been suggested that five million acres of wetlands in the Mississippi River basin are necessary to help prevent the dead zone, or hypoxia, in the Gulf of Mexico. However, there is no real plan to achieve the addition of 10 million acres. This was not a conscious political decision but the result of decades of gridlock. A national water policy should determine whether the nation proceeds with this recommendation or not.
A national policy decision is required to determine what level of storm protection should be provided for flood-prone areas like the Gulf Coast. This is not an engineering decision for the USACE or Federal Emergency Management Agency to make. The cost of the required infrastructure is potentially so high and the risk to communities and industries is so great, that a national policy consensus is necessary. As a nation we must decide to provide billions in federal resources to protect the Gulf Coast and support its industries of navigation, energy, and fishing in a timely manner or to abandon them. If we are to abandon these areas to the ravages of nature, it must be a national policy decision and cannot be a USACE decision. What has happened for almost forty years is a steady drip of federal activity that accomplished almost nothing except to create a false sense of security among the people of the Gulf Coast. The unacceptable result was Hurricane Katrina. Similar scenarios loom over much of our water resources infrastructure. We must have action in the form of a national water policy before another disaster occurs.
Globalization has made trade more important than ever. Our deepwater ports are an indispensable component of the trade engine. It seems like every few years, shippers are demanding deeper ports for ever-bigger container ships, tankers, and liquefied natural gas carriers. The more expensive fuel becomes, the more efficient and environmentally friendly our inland navigation system appears. Barges move grain, fertilizer, coal, and ore much more efficiently than rail or trucks with a much lower carbon footprint. However, there is no national water policy that addresses how we will keep our navigation system competitive or how we will address the associated environmental damages to our watersheds. A national water policy must set the guidelines for how our navigation structures, channels, and ports (the built environment) are integrated into our watershed and wetland areas (the natural environment) to preserve essential hydrogeomorphic processes.
To be clear, there is an option not to build or maintain infrastructure. There is an option to let the natural environment degrade. However, we cannot let the infrastructure slowly fail without warning the public. We cannot let the natural environment collapse without a conscious public decision to do that. If we are not going to provide flood protection, we ought not to allow development in flood-prone areas. If we are not going to maintain inland navigation, then we ought to recognize that there will be an impact to our railroads and highways. All of this ought to be captured in our national water policy.
Principles and Guidelines
The Water Resources Council was inactivated in the 1980s after producing Economic and Environmental Principles and Guidelines for Water and Related Land Resources Implementation Studies (USACE 1983), a document referred to as the “Principles and Guidelines” and one that has guided the Civil Works Program since that time. (The 1983 Principles and Guidelines replaced the Principles and Standards [P&S] of 1980 [not 1973], which were a Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)-codified modification of the 1973 P&S with expanded guidance on environmental quality. The 1980 date represents the Carter Administration’s decision to issue the P&S as CFR regulations that arguably were third-party enforceable. That action, late in the term, was what generated the vehement opposition to the P&S early in the Reagan Administration, especially from Secretary Watt. Had Carter not issued the 1980 version as regulations, they might not have changed in 1983.)
The Water Resources Council should be reactivated to produce a national water policy and to revise the Principles and Guidelines. The problems with the Principles and Guidelines are well-known. Principles and Guidelines are focused on individual projects without regard for system or watershed impacts. Principles and Guidelines are mainly about national economic development and not affecting the environment adversely. Principles and Guidelines fail to properly recognize environmental costs and benefits. Revised Principles and Guidelines should emphasize the importance of public safety, the economic value of environmental cost and benefits, and incorporate risk management and uncertainty analysis, in addition to economic development on a life-cycle basis. A new Principles and Guidelines document should adopt a watershed approach making integrated water resource plans and regional sediment management plans a prerequisite to any project authorization. Civil engineers ought to make up a significant part of the Water Resources Council, which should also articulate a vision for a national policy to strengthen engineering leadership in the Civil Works Program, especially as regards critical infrastructure such as dams and levees.
Funding
Rough Cost of Major Environmental Projects
•
Everglades restoration $10B;
•
Coastal Louisiana $14B; and
•
Missouri River fish and wildlife mitigation $3B.
The lessons of Hurricane Katrina, well-documented by the USACE, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Society of Civil Engineers, are clear. The environmental damage and economic cost of failed infrastructure far exceed the cost of new infrastructure and whatever adverse impact to the environment it might entail. Spending on flood protection for high-risk areas and environmental restoration for recognized ecological treasures such as the Everglades, coastal Louisiana, and the Missouri River basin would justify increasing the Army Civil Works budget immediately. (The Missouri River Fish and Wildlife Mitigation Program was authorized by Congress decades ago to restore 160,000 acres of Missouri River wetlands to mitigate the impact of dams and navigation on the river. It is less than half completed.) Yet successive administrations and Congresses have remained deadlocked while the built and natural environments continue to deteriorate. Although water resources are critical to agriculture and transportation nationwide, funding for water resource infrastructure, as measured by the civil works appropriation, has basically stagnated while farm and highway bills continue to grow. More than anything else, this seems to reflect the lack of a national water policy. It certainly does not reflect a consensus that roads and farm subsidies are more important than water resources. There must be a substantial increase in the overall funding of civil works.
Management Improvements
Project Management
Civil engineers should also speak out on the management of the civil works program at the national level. There ought to be a new consensus on improving the development and execution of water resources infrastructure projects. The fact that it took over forty years to develop and build the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project (Wooley and Shabman 2007), which protected a major American city, should be a national embarrassment. (Congress authorized the project on October 27, 1965, and it was not one hundred percent complete when Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005.)
Congressional and executive branch funding processes are a tremendous handicap to the program and ensure that projects cost too much and take too long to build. Inherently governmental functions within the program, especially research and development, regulatory affairs, and watershed management, are tied to individual projects or an uncertain funding stream ostensibly, among other reasons, to make the USACE operate more like a business. The USACE is not a business.
Project management in major construction projects is absolutely critical. Yet our current program does not allow the USACE to manage cost or schedule or contracts. Because Congress appropriates funds on an annual basis, the USACE is more focused on chasing annual appropriations than on managing work. This in turn makes it very difficult to schedule engineering and construction rationally and drives costs up while slowing projects down. This unacceptable situation was made worse by removing the contracting authority from district engineers and project managers and giving it to a separate contracting entity. First and foremost, as a premier independent engineering and construction agency and a first responder, the USACE must have its own independent contracting authority that allows it to design and construct projects effectively without the impediments that encumber other federal agencies. The district engineer, as well as the project manager for major projects, must be independent contracting officers. Although a separate contracting entity may be suitable for constructing sidewalks or buying toilet paper, it is totally unsuited for large-scale construction.
Project Financing
For large projects, Congress should appropriate funds on a project basis and only revisit the appropriation for major changes. A project manager should be nominated by the USACE and the administration and confirmed by the Senate. That project manager should remain with the project from engineering through startup to ensure cost control and quality. Management of a construction project of $1 billion or more is at least as important as some military commands or other federal positions that require Senate confirmation. Managing projects in this way improves accountability and provides for a clearer audit trail over a much shorter project execution period.
Funding the inherently governmental functions of the USACE should be completely separated from operations, maintenance, and construction. The policy of recent years that has research and development dependant on projects for most of its funding is ill advised. There are other functions such as data collection that must be accomplished and cannot be tied to specific projects but are required, for example, to support watershed planning, regional sediment management, and other activities that are essential for the management of the natural water resource infrastructure. A new national water policy should also determine how watershed planning will be conducted and coordinated on a regional basis. This federal function should be fully funded to ensure that planning stays current.
USACE as a Construction Agency
Certain organizational reforms are needed within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers but not the ones that critics have been generally clamoring for over the last two decades. The USACE, in fact, must do a better job of engineering and construction. The USACE should divest itself of functions that are not critical to building and maintaining water resources infrastructure to focus on its core competencies. For example, the USACE still maintains many recreation areas and a large number of rangers to police them. This function ought to be transferred to the U.S. National Park Service or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The USACE also has economists who make economic predictions to support project development as well as hundred of biologists to defend the environmental merits of projects. Other federal agencies should be developing economic justification or environmental impacts of water resources infrastructure, not the USACE. For example, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Transportation have great interest in a working inland navigation system and they should take the lead role in justifying the national economic development value of such projects. Similarly the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a great interest in increasing wetlands in the Mississippi River basin to improve water quality and eliminate hypoxia in the Gulf. EPA should justify, develop, and finance these projects and let the USACE build them. Of course, USACE civil engineers should be involved in the development in areas of their core competencies (i.e., civil engineering, hydrology, hydraulics, etc.), but the economics and the biology should be addressed by others.
Developing Engineer Leaders
The USACE does need better procedures and policies to develop senior engineers, managers, and leaders, both in uniform and out. The concurrent challenges of the War on Terror and Hurricane Katrina have shown that the USACE needs a robust and skilled cadre of engineer leaders. This requires an intensive program to recruit and maintain talented professionals from the top down. The officers in the USACE must be schooled in civil engineering and given the requisite experience to become licensed professional engineers. The decision to make engineer officers just managers, without requiring a civil engineering degree, was a poor decision for the Army and for the Civil Works Program and should be reversed immediately. This means that the Army will have to aggressively recruit civil engineers for the officer corps. The Army should also strive to improve the quality of the civil engineers it recruits by expanding the civil engineering programs at the U.S. Military Academy and colleges with major Army Reserve Officer Training Corps programs. This means that the Army must establish and maintain career paths within the USACE that develop engineering and construction skills progressively, and concurrently with combat skills, so that there is a pool of competent engineer senior leaders available to sustain our water resources infrastructure and our ability to wage war overseas. The Army must establish the necessary career paths to make this possible.
No More Katrinas
Finally, the post-Katrina findings of ASCE, the ten “Calls to Action” must be addressed by the Congress, the USACE, and the administration. Many of these issues are being worked on already and the recommendations I outline are calling attention to others. However, as time makes Hurricane Katrina’s memory less painful, it would be natural to lose sight of some of these concerns. That cannot be allowed to happen. There must be continued review of these issues to ensure they are fixed. These include keeping safety at the
Katrina Calls to Action
1.
Keep safety first;
2.
Quantify the risks;
3.
Communicate the risks to the public;
4.
Rethink the whole system, including land use;
5
Correct the deficiencies;
6.
Put someone in charge;
7.
Improve interagency coordination;
8.
Upgrade engineering design procedures;
9.
Bring in independent experts; and
10.
Place safety first.
Conclusion
The Civil Works Program and our nation’s water infrastructure are arguably at their lowest point in five decades. This presents an opportunity for civil engineers to lead, to revitalize the program, and to improve the grade on our natural and built water resources infrastructure. They can do this by promoting a new national water policy, revising the Principles and Guidelines, and increasing civil works funding. Civil engineers should also support administrative changes in financing and contracting federal projects to improve the efficiency of engineering and construction. The USACE can do its part by improving its core competencies. Working together the engineering community can improve the grade on water resources infrastructure and provide the water resources that the nation needs for a strong economy and a better environment in the twenty-first century.
References
ASCE. (2005). “Report card for America’s infrastructure, 2005 grades.” ⟨http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/page.cfm?id=103⟩ (June 19, 2008).
Coll, B. D., Keith, J. E., and Rosenthal, H. H. (1958). The Corps of Engineers: Troops and equipment, United States Army in World War II, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.
Galloway, G. E. (1974). Civil works in the Army. Army War Coll., Carlisle, Penn.
Meese, E. (2005). The heritage guide to the Constitution, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, D.C.
National Research Council. (1992). Restoration of aquatic ecosystems, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C. 1992.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). (1983). “Economic and environmental principles and guidelines for water and related land resources implementation studies.” Washington, D.C.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). (2008). “Brief history: Improving the nation’s transportation system.” ⟨http://www.hq.usace.army.mil/History/brief.htm#2imp⟩ (Jun. 19, 2008).
Water Resources Development Act of 2007, Public Law 110-114, U.S. Statutes at Large 121 (2007) 1041, codified at U.S. Code 33 2201 et seq.
Wooley, D., and Shabman, L. (2007). “Decision making chronology for the Lake Ponchatrain and vicinity hurricane protection Pproject.” Draft Final Report, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Institute for Water Resources, Washington, D.C.
Biographies
Dominic Izzo has served as an army engineer officer and as principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army (Civil Works). In the private sector he was responsible for the design, construction, and startup of power plants in the Philippines and China and of a liquefied natural gas terminal and harbor in India. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected].
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 8 • Issue 4 • October 2008
Pages: 210 - 216
Copyright
© 2008 ASCE.
History
Published online: Oct 1, 2008
Published in print: Oct 2008
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.