An Agency of Unchecked Clout

Here in the waterlogged agricultural bootheel of southeast Missouri, though, that gap is about as popular as the corn borer or boll weevil. The Corps has used the emergency plan to drown the area only once. But the Mississippi backs through the gap and into the floodway almost every spring, damaging crops, blocking roads, flushing thick streams of wriggling fish into the fields. The area is still known as Swampeast Missouri, and its residents see the gap as a physical symbol of unfairness, a separation between them and better-off, better-educated, better-protected communities.

The floodway project would finally close the gap.

"The Corps built flood control for everyone else: It's our turn now," says Martha Ellen Black, director of a family support center in East Prairie. "We don't deserve to live like people in a Third World country. We have a right to equal protection."

Closing the Gap

East Prairie sent President Clinton a strange promotional video a few years ago, almost bragging that half its 4,000 residents have no high school diploma, that a third of them live in poverty. "Living the American Dream in East Prairie is a little harder," the narrator intoned. Today, town officials eagerly show off 1989 photographs of the public housing authority's offices underwater, of the nursing home surrounded by sandbags, of national champion oak trees drowning in an eight-foot deluge. Floods, they say, are the root of their problems.

And the Corps project is supposed to change everything.

Locals expect it to attract new businesses, ensure emergency access, promote tourism, bolster schools, revive civic pride, even stop mysterious waterborne fungal infections. And while East Prairie is not actually located in the floodway, supporters are quick to cite the project's benefits for the largest town that is, Pinhook, whose 52 residents all happen to be black; they settled in the floodway because whites wouldn't sell them land anywhere else.

The entire area considers the project a matter of survival--and an entitlement, since every other community along the Mississippi seems to have a Corps project. So Rep. Emerson has carried on a crusade begun by her late husband and predecessor, Rep. Bill Emerson, relentlessly pressuring Corps officials, lunching with Westphal, steering funds the project's way. She has also led the fight on Capitol Hill against the administration's efforts to "green" the Corps.

"The elite environmentalist types want to disenfranchise these people, but I'm going to fight for them," said Emerson, a former restaurant industry lobbyist who is a member of the Appropriations Committee. "They're an endangered species, too, as much as any of these mussels or fish or whatever."

Congress first authorized the levee closure in 1954, but the Corps never got the go-ahead to move dirt. Then in 1986, Bill Emerson tucked an expanded project into the Water Resources Development Act. That was not hard for a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which oversees the Corps. On Capitol Hill, it is still considered almost bad form to oppose a water project in another member's district, much less a mere authorization, which does not ensure funding. Corps authorizations have long been viewed as congressional prerogatives, nearly as automatic as the franking privilege or special license plates.

But 1986 was the year President Reagan challenged the prerogative, holding a pork-loaded water bill hostage until Congress agreed to boost local cost-sharing requirements. That put the floodway project on hold, because the "local sponsor," the area's levee board, could not pay its share. The break came in 1994, when Clinton declared ailing East Prairie a rural "enterprise community," and Bill Emerson drafted an amendment allowing federal enterprise funds to cover most of the project's local burden. His amendment became law after his death in 1996, and Vice President Gore's office approved the use of federal funds for the project.

So the Corps began a study.

The Corps is supposed to conduct objective studies of proposed water projects, but it also has an obvious interest in their outcome, since it only gets to build the projects it deems worthwhile. The agency's "Strategic Vision" specifically urges Corps commanders to "target new work," and several regional commanders have pledged to set specific goals for mission and budget growth. So there is a strong incentive for Corps study managers to reach pro-project conclusions: If they don't, key legislators get angry and the Corps doesn't grow.