COMMERCIAL NAVIGATION TAKES U.S. TAXPAYERS FOR A RIVER RIDE

Most of the nation's large rivers have been dammed, dredged, straightened, or altered in a variety of ways to accommodate economic development. Altering the natural environment has a high cost, and to maintain an unnatural situation costs more in the long run than the original act to change it.

Another cost that is difficult to measure is the loss of natural resources associated with such activities. Indeed, many species of animals are in peril and the natural processes that perpetuate species and rejuvenates riverine habitat are arrested or destroyed.

This article will not deal with the loss of habitat or species in our nation's large rivers. Instead, we wish to present information from one side of a very controversial issue: is commercial navigation on our large rivers feasible and who is paying for it?

Commercial navigation has long been considered the cheapest mode of transporting goods, especially for agricultural products. However, Bruce Ubpin of Forbes Magazine (3/23/98) recently published an article entitled River of Subsidies, which details the billions of dollars worth of subsidies given to barge companies and shippers through construction and maintenance of navigation projects on the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

We hope, the following information could be used by the public to make informed decisions about how our tax dollars are spent. Excerpts from that article follow:

"Shippers and their customers in the coal- and farm-belt want bigger locks. Christopher Brescia, president of Midwest Area River Coalition 2000, a lobbying arm for waterway users, is betting seven lock replacements will be needed over the next 25 years. Estimated costs to build bigger locks range from $250 million to $1 billion each.

"...the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has just spent the past six years on a $49 million study forecasting to 2050 the traffic on the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers.

"... Barges are the most subsidized form of transport in the U.S. Their fuel taxes cover around 10% of the annual $674 million that the Corps spends building, operating and maintaining locks, dams and navigation channels. Taxpayers foot the rest. Compare that with railroads, which got a lot of land gifts a century ago but now cover all the costs of maintaining their rights of way. Even trucks repay, via fuel and user taxes, most arguably, all of the damage they do to the Interstates.

"In the late 1940s the federal government spent $6 billion (that's $54 billion in today's money) to make the Missouri River commercially navigable from Sioux City, Iowa to St. Louis, Mo. It justified the cost by estimating annual river traffic of 12 million tons. Last year the Missouri floated 1.5 million tons. In 1985 the Army engineers finished a 234-mile ditch to connect the Tennessee and Tombigbee rivers in Mississippi and Alabama. They forecast annual traffic of 27 million tons. Twelve years later the Tenn-Tom Waterway sees a third of that. Cost: $1.8 billion, plus $22 million a year for maintenance.

"Do we really need to widen those locks? Iowa State University economist C. Phillip Baumel says the river could get by with small, much cheaper fixes like extending lock guide walls or replacing the first-come, first-served system with a reservation system to relieve congestion.

"It's a fair question to ask: What in hell is the U.S. Army doing building locks for commercial traffic? For that we can thank the powerful farm lobby, which in the 1930s and 1950s screamed that without free locks and channels they would go out of business. Congress responded by putting the Army engineers into the lock business. Since then, farmers and their friends in the barge industry (notably including the politically ubiquitous Archer Daniels Midland ) have fiercely protected their turf.

"It would be an interesting exercise to privatize the eight Illinois River locks by simply auctioning them off to the highest bidder, who could then charge whatever toll the traffic would bear. On this hard-nosed basis, the locks may be worthless. A study by a University of Illinois graduate student concluded that the purchase price based on this toll revenue would be less than what the Army spends annually to maintain the things."

Bruce Hannon, Friends of the Mississippi Basin, says, "A study to verify these private sector values should be done." Hannon continues, "The U.S. General Accounting Office should be commissioned to calculate these values and compare them to the past and planned Corps expenditures. Such a comparison should verify for the Congress just how much waste of federal revenues is flowing down the rivers of the heartland."

Hannon quips, "If navigation were good for the local economy, then Cairo, Illinois would be Chicago."

The environmental impacts of navigation have been controversial on the Upper Mississippi ever since the locks and dams were constructed in the 1930's. Prior to their construction, even the top Corps of Engineers official in Washington, D.C. (Chief of Engineers) opposed the project, but he was over-ridden by Midwest agricultural interests, as well as by then President Herbert Hoover, an Iowa native.

The dams impounded vast acres of slackwater habitats that are now filling with fine sediments. Any maintenance, operation, or new construction of these navigation projects should include funding for operation and maintenance of the aquatic environments that the projects created.

This would include removal of accumulating sediments in order to permit the survival of the river's native aquatic organisms.

Mike Petersen is a fisheries biologist and Dave Herzog is a fisheries assistant for Missouri Department of Conservation.