Star-Trib Editorial Praising Oberstar
Editorial: Corps curriculum / Needed scrutiny for the engineers
Star Tribune
Published Oct 10, 2002 ED10

Over the past several decades, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to convert the Mississippi
River
into North America's premier freight waterway. Barge transit is an
efficient way to move coal, fertilizer, gravel and other bulky
commodities, and
Midwestern farmers send as much as one-third of their grain down the
Mississippi on its way to foreign markets. On balance, the taxpayers'
investment has yielded huge dividends.

Or has it? Three years ago, the Corps got caught cooking the
books to justify a mammoth new upgrade of locks and dams on the
Mississippi. The scandal cast doubt on the size of economic payoffs from

Mississippi infrastructure and devastated the Corps' reputation for
reliable
research.

This year Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., introduced a pair of
sensible amendments that would bring greater accountability to Corps
projects. Now leaders in the House are resorting to various procedural
tricks
to stymie the Oberstar amendments. But they should understand that
taxpayers demand a higher level of accountability from the Corps today,
and give
Oberstar's amendments the vote they deserve.

Corps officials have told Congress that they learned a lesson
from the Mississippi embarrassment. But plainly they have not. The
General Accounting Office recently found that in planning a new proj ect

on the Delaware River, the Corps overstated the economic benefits by
nearly a factor of three. The Portland Oregonian newspaper found shoddy
arithmetic in the Corps' homework for a similar proj ect on the Columbia

River.

Oberstar would require the Corps to obtain outside peer review
of its economic projections on major projects, and he would require the
Corps to meet a higher standard on "mitigation" of the environmental
damage caused by its projects.

Oberstar is no hostile gadfly. He is one of Congress' top
transportation authorities and long an admirer of the Corps.
Washington's
environmental community counted it a great victory when Oberstar offered
his
proposals as amendments to Congress' big water projects bill for 2002.

Early this week, the House leadership tried to force a vote on
the water bill without Oberstar's amendments, then backed down when he
pointed out that they had promised him a hearing. Now it's rumored that
House leaders will try to bring the bill back under a rule banning all
amendments. They should quit the gamesmanship and make sure that the
Corps gets
the additional scrutiny it so plainly needs.

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