Editorial: Fee Trial Balloon Should Burst In GOP’s Face

If the GOP is planning additional bargeline user fees to pay for river maintenance, as the Associated Press reports, that trial balloon should burst in the GOP’s face.

According to the AP’s February 6 report, John Paul Woodley, the assistant Army secretary who oversees the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said, “We want to hear what the industry people and the shippers have in mind.” What does he expect them to say? He sounds more like an employee of the Office of Management and Budget.

With the fuel tax now at 20 cents a gallon, towboat operators now pay “half of the cost of replacing and repairing the nation’s massive system of locks and dams…while the other half comes from the Corps’ general revenue,” the AP report says.

Woodley said the problem “is that the trust fund has steadily decreased over the past decade as barge towboats have become more fuel efficient.” (The Inland Waterways Trust Fund had $250 million in it as of October 2006.)

So it’s the fault of the towing industry, right? So let’s penalize for efficiency.

Meanwhile, the AP report noted, expenditures to replace locks built in the 1930s have increased.

“At that rate,” Woodley told the AP, “you are very quickly going to exhaust the trust fund. The question becomes, ‘What are you going to do?’”

First of all, if waterway modernization had not been neglected for so many decades, the cost would be much lower.

Ann Burns, a vice president with The American Waterways Operators, points out, “Operators have already paid roughly $1 billion in fuel taxes over the past 10 years for this purpose.”

Woodley said, “postponing new construction projects until the trust fund gains more money is not an option.”

Merely improving government efficiency could solve most of this nation’s financial woes. Wasted money in Iraq is being measured by the tons—billions in American currency, delivered to Iraq on flats for the purpose of stimulating the economy. Much is missing. Some $110 billion has been directed to the New Orleans region for Katrina recovery efforts, and many billions of it cannot be accounted for. Money, Mr. Woodley, is not the problem. It is inefficiency in government and the lack of proper oversight.

The U.S. government does not spend wisely. The president wants an additional $700 billion for the Iraq effort. Perhaps he needs it. But a mere $4 billion or $5 billion would do wonders for the outdated locks and dams that prevent our navigation system from being as efficient as it should be. That navigation system moved billions worth of cargo and military ships during World War II.

The Government Accountability Office has reported repeatedly that some $15 billion annually is produced by the U.S. water transportation system through customs fees. Fewer than $4 billion or $5 billion annually has gone back to nurture the system. The rest is siphoned off to the U.S. Treasury, and much of it is squandered. We build “highways to nowhere,” tunnels in Boston, and rehab Florida swamps at a cost topping $8 billion.

The U.S. transportation infrastructure is suffering from neglect, and that reduces the efficiency of water transportation. Moreover, the Gulf Coast Mariners Association (GCMA) presented to the 110th Congress at the end of January “a petition” containing a scathing report on the disintegration of the lower-level maritime industry itself at the hands of the Coast Guard over the past several decades. The gist of the 51-page complaint is that Congress needs to pay more attention to the marine industry and its workers. We cannot disagree.

If you believe we exaggerate the importance of the marine industry, Mr. Woodley, read the GCMA report. Federal records indicate that the brown-water towing industry moves 15 percent of the nation’s gross national product for well under 5 percent of the total U.S. transportation cost.

Our problem is a government that neglects the nation’s strengths and plays to its weaknesses. It’s a government that misapplies funds while allowing the inland waterway infrastructure to erode. As Bill O’Reilly might say, our government is ignoring the folks. We need more efficiency.

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