Mississippi Mud - Army Corps of Engineers employee declares the proposed barge channel in the MIssissippi River is economic unsound - Brief Article

Sierra, July, 2000 by Dean Rebuffoni

The Army Corps of Engineers wants to build and dredge, no matter what

Not since 1928 has the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had to contend with an employee as discomfitting as Donald C. Sweeney II.

That year, Major Charles L. Hall, a career Army officer, was assigned to study the feasibility of creating a 9-foot-deep, 670-mile-long barge channel in the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and St. Louis. Congress had ordered the study, responding to intense lobbying by politicians and Twin Cities business interests along the river.

To the shock and anger of project boosters, Hall recommended against channelization. The Corps' top brass ordered him to reconsider. Hall stood by his original conclusion, saying the project was economically unsound. He also echoed the concerns of conservationists who warned of the environmental risks of inundating vast areas of floodplain behind the dams that the project would require.

Given the historic predilection of the Corps' top brass to keep busy, the reaction was predictable: They removed Hall from the study, then recommended that Congress approve the project. It did.

Fast forward to today and Don Sweeney, a highly respected career economist for the Corps. He, too, determined that a Corps project on the Mississippi would be economically unsound, stressing that the agency's analysis failed to include hefty environmental costs. He, too, was removed from his high position in a key river study by the Corps' top brass.

But Sweeney declined to be the good soldier. He blew the whistle in February, charging in a signed affidavit that top Corps officers, after a closed-door meeting with their cronies in the barge industry, "intentionally and deliberately" distorted study findings to endorse an economic and environmental boondoggle.

The result has been outraged conservationists, a flurry of denials of wrongdoing by the Corps, barge-industry denouncements of Sweeney, federal and independent investigations, both congressional consternation and machinations, and a media field day.

"I didn't think this would create the kind of media explosion that it has," said Sweeney, who has been a Corps employee for 22 of his 49 years and holds a doctorate in economics. "I was absolutely dumbfounded by the interest that people have taken in this issue."

The issue is this: Should the Corps spend at least $1.2 billion for construction of locks and dams to enable giant barges to move faster on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers?

That's what the industry wants to boost its profits, which are already greatly enhanced by the fact that federal taxpayers foot the entire bill for maintaining and operating the nation's inland waterway system. That amounts to roughly $700 million a year, more than $130 million of which is spent on the Upper Mississippi and the Illinois.

Sweeney, who had been in charge of the crucial economic part of the current study, challenged the Corps' support for five new or expanded locks and dams on the Mississippi and two on the Illinois. These would replace some of the locks and dams built in the 1930s as recommended in the study that Major Hall originally disavowed, doubling their barge-handling capacity.

All told, there are 37 navigation locks and attached dams on the two rivers, all operated by the Corps. Because they hold water at artificially high levels to maintain a channel deep and wide enough for barge traffic, the locks and dams have greatly altered the natural ebb and flow needed to sustain and rejuvenate aquatic life. The almost quarter-mile-long barge assemblies stir up huge loads of sediment while plowing through the river with 20,000-ton cargoes. The impounded water initially increased aquatic productivity, but a multi-agency study--in which the Corps itself participated--questions the sustainability of the system as island habitats continue to erode away and mud deposited above the dams snuffs out aquatic plants and fish-spawning areas.

Numerous studies by non-Corps scientists have also documented this degradation, and for the last 30 years the Sierra Club and other conservation groups have fought to prevent an expansion of the locks and dams. Although Congress in 1986 formally declared the Mississippi River System to be both a "nationally significant waterway" (for commercial navigation) and a "nationally significant ecosystem," the Corps continues to heavily tilt its river management in favor of the barge industry.

That industry is dominated by some of the nation's largest and most profitable corporations, including Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, ConAgra, Eastern Industries, Ingram Industries, and American Commercial Barge Lines.

Sweeney, who is protected under a federal whistleblower law, remains employed at the Corps' St. Louis district headquarters, but is no longer in charge of its economic research, despite a history of excellent performance and numerous public-service awards. "I'm doing a lot of busy work," he said. His downfall appears to have been his dedication to his discipline. "The higher I got in the Corps of Engineers the less it seemed that real economic analysis mattered."