WCI Holds Annual Waterways Symposium

Members of Waterways Council Inc. and maritime industry stakeholders gathered in Nashville, Tenn., December 8–10 for the 22nd annual Waterways Symposium.

The meeting convened with WCI’s annual membership and board of directors meetings, during which senior staff—including President and CEO Tracy Zea, Senior Vice President Deb Calhoun, Vice President-Midwest Area Paul Rohde and Vice President-Government Relations Jen Armstrong—all offered reports.

A repeated theme in their reports was the importance of engaging with members of Congress. Consistent, predictable funding is crucial to completing current construction projects like Kentucky Lock and Chickamauga Lock, Zea said, and finishing those projects is critical to tackling the backlog of construction projects farther down the queue.

Early in the Waterways Symposium program, attendees heard a report from HDR, represented by Christine Altendorf and Paul Dierking, which WCI has tasked with identifying best practices and strategies for improving the delivery of capital projects on the inland waterways.

Dierking shared some statistics that WCI supporters are likely quite familiar with, including the fact that more than 35 percent of the locks on the inland waterways of the United States are older than 80 years, and close to 80 percent have exceeded their 50-year design life.

Organizational challenges exist for tackling the huge backlog of waterways infrastructure projects. Funding uncertainty leads to delivery delays and cost escalations. There’s the challenge of meeting benefit-cost ratio (BCR) requirements. There are also competition challenges, with 17 Corps districts all tasked with projects and querying the Inland Navigation Design Center for engineering, design analysis and review services.

Dierking also drew attention to the length of projects and the fact that project managers retire, with knowledge loss posing a challenge for executing projects to completion.

Based on those challenges and after gathering data for project costs, construction, contracting and delivery across many sectors, HDR developed a series of recommendations for improving project deliveries.

Altendorf began with recommendations to Congress.

“This is an entire system, so if you have an impact on a lock and dam upstream, it’s going to impact what’s going on downstream,” Altendorf said.

Those far-reaching impacts led the HDR team to focus on programmatic funding.

“All funding would be put into a pot, and multiple projects then would be worked out later in the prioritization process,” she said. “This would include the investigation portions (the planning, engineering and design), the construction and the operations and maintenance.”

Altendorf explained that, in that format, money could be moved around as needed.

She admitted to some challenges for that kind of programmatic funding.

“This is not going to surprise you, but Congress does not necessarily like to do programmatic funding for a couple of different reasons,” she said.

That’s because members of Congress like to carve out funding for projects in their districts. In addition, there’s a perceived loss of oversight when projects are lumped together into one pot or program, Altendorf said.

Altendorf and Dierking also highlighted a couple of administration-level recommendations. The first was to rescind or modify Executive Order 12322, issued in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan, which mandates an OMB review of every land or water resources project proposal prior to congressional review. The present interpretation of that executive order means that OMB withholds much of the information related to a project from Congress, Altendorf said.

“This becomes very hard for Congress to even get the information they need for their particular project that might be in their congressional district, and then definitely more challenging if they’re going to think about funding this as a program,” she said.

A second administration-level issue is to consider continuing contracts. Altendorf admitted, though, that OMB often frowns on continuing contracts out of a hesitance to commit future administrations to them.

Dierking then shared some recommendations HDR identified for the Corps. First on his list was to create an inland navigation system program office at the headquarters level that would focus on the full lifecycle of projects. That office would focus on a handful of projects each year to fully use construction funds each year. Finally, Dierking mentioned collaborating with private industry to deepen the design base for projects and improving design confidence to guard against cost overruns.

A question from the crowd arose as to which of the recommendations the HDR team would consider the highest priority. The answer was implementing a programmatic approach to the construction program. Another attendee asked if Corps leadership was aware of the report. Altendorf said the team has been transparent with the Corps throughout the process.

“I think they’ll accept a lot of what is in there, knowing that they can only do so much without Congress and without the administration outside of USACE,” she said.