Mississippi infrastructure neglected as budgets tighten
By Ken Wells, Big River Coalition
The saying goes, “What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas.” In Louisiana, however, what happens in New Orleans goes out to the entire world. Tourists who come to the city tend to gravitate to the color of the French Quarter and the lights of Bourbon Street. Those who wander a few blocks away and climb the levee see an entirely different spectacle, the full might of America’s international economy floating past on the Mississippi. Tankers, laden with petroleum, push their way north to the largest refinery in the country. Empty bulk ships steam upriver toward grain terminals. Towboats push football-field lengths of barges loaded with coal. On the far bank, fleetboats do a delicate ballet as they move individual barges in and out of the fleets, while shipyard workers put a tugboat into drydock. Taken as a whole, the deep-draft Mississippi is the busiest waterway system in the country and second only to the Yangtze in the world. Today, that critical system is at risk.
Faced with inadequate funds and an unwillingness to shift money from other parts of its budget, the Army Corps of Engineers is pursuing a policy of rationing dredging on the river and allowing the deep-draft channel to silt in. In the short-term it is creating turmoil for the 29 states that use the river for international trade. In the long-term it raises serious questions about America’s ability to make the kind of decisions that will increase rather than hurt our international competitiveness.
A little background on the Mississippi is needed. The river draws on 14,000 miles of inland waterways, converging at the deep-draft ports in Louisiana, making it an ideal superhighway for bulk cargo from the heartland of America. While container and cruise ship traffic has increased dramatically on the river, it still serves as the nation’s most efficient route for bulk commodities like coal, grain and soybeans. In fact, about a quarter of the bulk ships that call on American ports call on the Mississippi. The value of exports moving through the New Orleans Customs office is between $85-105 billion dollars annually in recent years.
The importance of the river to trade has never been in doubt, since the days of dugout canoes, but funding the maintenance of the river has been difficult. Historically, the White House tends to low-ball funding for dredging the lower river to put responsibility for spending on Congress. Congress tends to low-ball funding in appropriations bills knowing it can “plus up” the needed money on the next supplemental appropriations bill. Expecting this back-and-forth style of accounting, the Army Corps of Engineers has traditionally dredged the river to keep the 45-foot channel clear, shifting funds into the project until Congress restored the money in the next supplemental budget.
In the last budgeting cycle, the Corps took a different tack. Since Congress has yet to pass a funding bill, the Corps was left with the President’s budget, which gave $63 million for maintaining the deep-draft Mississippi. That funding level represents approximately 60 percent of the $104 million that the maintenance costs have averaged over the last few years. Shortly before the fiscal year started in October, the Corps announced that it would ration dredging so that it could stay within its budget. The idea that the Corps, and not the Mississippi, could decide when dredging was necessary reminded many of Mark Twain’s comments that, “the Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.”
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