Editorial: It’s Hard To Love A Dog When It Keeps Biting

It is difficult to appreciate a newspaper when it is against what you believe and supports virtually everything you don’t.

We cannot recall the last time that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch supported a waterway project or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. St. Louis is a major river city that once depended very heavily upon the river for its livelihood—and that was not too many decades ago.

The Post published an editorial on February 17 bashing the Corps and the Upper Mississippi/Illinois river modernization proposal, estimated to cost about $3.4 billion. It repeated bad things it has published in the past, many of which came right out of the mouths of disgruntled environmentalists and never were questioned. To the Post, most river projects are “pork.”

Two events inspired the Post to write its “Pork Chops” editorial. One, Assistant Secretary of the Army-Civil Works John P. Woodley Jr. recommended that the Upper Miss/Illinois proposal be put on hold for further study. Two, about 80 U.S. senators signed a letter to House Majority Leader Bill Frist, asking for action on the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA).

Our inland waterways are part of a major transportation infrastructure that handles upwards of 15 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product annually at only slightly over 2 percent of the transportation cost. The mode, according to the Maritime Administration, is far more environmentally friendly than trains and trucks. That MarAd data is ignored. Deep sea and river transportation contributes $15 billion plus annually to the U.S. treasury through customs collections, according to the General Services Administration. Less than $5 billion is redirected back to water transport to take care of its needs. Unfortunately, the backlog of upgrading and maintenance projects totals in the billions. River traffic includes both import and export cargo.

We desperately need passage of WRDA to maintain and modernize the infrastructure. Such a bill has not been passed since 2000. In July, before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf, the U.S. House passed WRDA 2005 by a large margin. Since Hurricane Katrina struck, the Senate has not considered the bill. The advent of Katrina did not and does not eliminate that need. That is what the letter to Frist was all about.

Adding fuel to the Post fire, the Office of Management and Budget said that with careful investment and maintenance, we could keep the undersized locks on the Upper Miss and Illinois operating for another 50 years. Yes, we could. But they would still be the bottleneck-producing locks they have been for several decades of their 70-year life span.

To simplify the proposal, let’s try a different tack. The Missouri Highway Department is to work on a 12-mile stretch of Highway 40 in St. Louis. Some interchanges on that stretch were designed for 1930s traffic. Vehicular traffic faces huge bottlenecks during rush hours. The river locks in question were built about the same time and, even though there are 1,200-foot locks (interchanges) in the system, the 600-foot old locks result in bottlenecks. If MoDOT just resurfaced Highway 40 and did not construct new interchanges, the problems would not be solved. That is the problem rivermen face. That upgrading would cost slightly above $1.5 billion. The rest of the $3.4 billion would go for improving the river environment. By comparison, we plan to spend $8 billion to upgrade a Florida swamp. Isn’t upgrading of the Mississippi River and Tributary system that moves cargo to and from our heartland worth it?

The Post goes back six years to show that traffic on the Upper has decreased. But the whole why of it is never explained. Ship rates on the Gulf are very high, causing farmers to ship via rail to the West Coast. Corn is being directed to ethanol plants in our own Midwest. But corn is not the only cargo moved on the rivers. Other grains, coal, oil, gasoline, chemicals, fertilizers, and hundreds of other products move by barge. While the method is relatively new, container-on-barge movements are beginning to grow. One day they could be plying the Upper Mississippi. Ignored mostly by critics is the burgeoning world population that will put pressure on transportation services.

The Upper Miss/Illinois proposal is part of the WRDA that the senators want passed. The Post never mentions WRDA by name, but it does impugn the authors of the bill by saying that the Upper Miss/Illinois proposal is part of legislation “larded with about $10 billion in pork.” To critics, everything that smells of water is pork.

Certainly the Corps is not beyond criticism, but it is an agency that does what Congress tells it to do. The Corps and its employees have been the object of scorn by the Post for many years in articles that Corps employees believe are not based on facts or real truth. The latest editorial virtually labels the employees liars and cheats when it says the Corps has been “caught dummying up its numbers three separate times while presenting ‘economic justifications’ for this project.”

The unsubstantiated charges of one whistleblower have been accepted without question. Did anyone with the newspaper ever ask why the numbers were being reworked? The traffic and tonnage figures being fed into the computer model were erroneous from the beginning, and industry leaders explained why. The Corps leaders agreed, but when adjustments were made, the charge of “cooking the books” was leveled. The whole process was intended to make sure the equation was correct. And yes, the purpose of the changes was to show that the project is justified.

Why would Corps employees not believe Post editors despise them? The Corps employees are simply people doing their jobs as directed. Perhaps if the Post dug deeper into river stories and was more balanced in its reporting, this insult could be mitigated.

But it’s hard to love a dog when it keeps biting.

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