An Agency of Unchecked Clout

In fact, one Corps memo last year announced that in order to "grow the civil works program," generals in headquarters and the Mississippi Valley Division had agreed to "get creative" with economic and environmental studies. "They will be looking for ways to get [studies] to 'yes' as fast as possible," it declared. "We have been encouraged to have our study managers not take 'no' for an answer. The push to grow the program is coming from the top down." And the administration has delegated all technical oversight of Corps studies back to the Corps; Westphal merely provides "policy review," and rarely alters recommendations.

The East Prairie study was assigned to the Memphis District, which is part of the Mississippi Valley Division. In April 1999, the district reached a preliminary conclusion that the benefits slightly outweighed the costs. Last week, the Corps issued its final report, conceding that the project would cause "some loss in wetland function and value" but proposing to "overcompensate" for the losses by planting oak trees on 9,500 acres.

"The Corps says this is a worthwhile project," said Terry Redfering, president of the local Chamber of Commerce. "What else is there to say?"

Quite a bit, according to environmentalists, anti-tax activists, scientists and economists. They point out that the Corps justified the project with 1996 crop prices, which have plummeted. It justified the levee portion with a 1954 interest rate, which has tripled. (The agency says it used the rate from the year the levee was first authorized.)

Corps documents also suggest the project will have little impact on most of East Prairie itself. The agency's analysts concluded that the town is now subject to flooding about once a decade--and will still be subject to flooding about once a decade when the project is done.

Instead, the Corps found that more than 90 percent of the project's benefits would go to local corn and soybean farmers, who could increase their yields a bit if they didn't have to worry about floods. According to county land maps, the five farmers on the levee board, the "local sponsor," own more than 15,000 acres in the affected floodplain. But when the nonprofit group Environmental Defense proposed a cheaper alternative designed to improve East Prairie's drainage but leave the already subsidized farmland alone, the Corps said no.

"This project is agricultural drainage masquerading as urban flood control," says Environmental Defense senior attorney Tim Searchinger. "It's a federal gift to a few special interests."

Meanwhile, biologists describe the project as an environmental catastrophe. It would break the last natural connection to the Mississippi between Cape Girardeau, Mo., and Helena, Ark., eliminating Missouri's last swath of backwater floodplain with direct access to the river. It would cut off the seasonal floods that sustain the area's giant bottomland hardwoods--and help fish spawn outside the Mississippi's punishing currents.

Overall, the Corps predicted the project will only eliminate 167 acres of wetlands overall, an estimate Searchinger said was "directly contradicted" by the agency's own data. The Corps acknowledged that it would reduce flooding on 8,000 acres of forested wetlands and 28,000 acres of agricultural wetlands. By contrast, in its regulatory role under the Clean Water Act, the Corps permitted more than 4,000 development projects last year, affecting less than 22,000 acres of wetlands.

The EPA has ranked the floodway project "environmentally unsatisfactory," its worst rating. The Fish and Wildlife Service and the Missouri Department of Conservation have been vehemently opposed, too. Robert Sheehan and Katie Dugger, scientists whose research the Corps relied on in its environmental analysis, have submitted affidavits flatly disputing that analysis, warning of severe impacts to mussels, fish and endangered least terns. Scientists and federal agencies have also said the Corps plan to "mitigate" the damages with reforestation is inadequate even if it works, and that it probably won't work.

Community leaders reply that agricultural wetlands shouldn't count as real wetlands, and that the project's opponents care more about shorebirds and fish than people. On a tour in his plane, Dee Dill, a farmer on the levee board, pointed out miles of cornfields puddled with rain. "This area isn't a swamp anymore; it's an agricultural community," he said. "It's fine if you want to save the world, but don't do it at our expense."

On a tour in a Missouri Department of Conservation skiff, David Wissehr, a wildlife biologist, showed the area from a different angle. He pointed out angular terns swooping into streams and ditches for fish, squeaking like trampolines. A silver carp jumped two feet out of a bayou. Great blue herons flapped above the oaks. "This is a special place, and there aren't a lot like it anymore," he said. "Cut it off from the river, and you kill it."

'America's River'

This spring, the White House went to war with the Corps over the Mississippi River.

The battleground was a draft presidential order directing the Corps to "chart a new direction" for the river. The directive noted that studies have attributed half the nation's wetland losses to Corps projects along the Mississippi. It said that "the benefits of flood damage reduction have come at great expense to the floodplain and riverine ecosystems associated with the Mississippi River, which we have come to know as America's River.

"The directive also would have forced the Corps to adopt higher environmental standards, review all projects affecting more than 500 acres of wetlands, and "ensure that federal water resource projects do not work against the purposes of other major federal programs, projects and expenditures.

"In other words, it would have halted projects like East Prairie's.

Then Emerson found out about it. She promptly wrote a scathing letter to Clinton, calling the draft language "an extraordinary and damaging expansion of executive authority" and warning that it would "seriously undermine" federal antipoverty initiatives in the Mississippi Delta. She rounded up a bipartisan coalition of 45 co-signers. Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, wrote his own blistering letter of protest. So did Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.), the most aggressive supporter of the Mississippi River lock expansions further upstream.

That was the last anyone has heard about the "new direction" order. White House aides say it's on hold. "There's too much political heat," one said. They are afraid that if Clinton issues it, Congress will just block it with legislation.

"I think it's buried. I hope it's buried," Emerson said.

Emerson believes the Corps should stick to its current direction: controlling rivers, valuing farmers over wildlife, turning uninhabited wetlands into productive dry land. Corps defenders say that without its herculean efforts to reroute water, there would be no future for floodplain communities such as Omaha or St. Louis or New Orleans--or Pinhook, the little town in the floodway. Jim Robinson, the patriarch of Pinhook, believes that if the Corps can close the levee gap, blacks from all over Missouri will flock to the area, reviving his tiny community.

But environmentalists point out that the floodway was never supposed to attract a revival; it was supposed to remain undeveloped. That's the flip side of Corps flood control projects: They can instill a false sense of security, luring pioneers into floodplains, accelerating demands for even more protection. Despite $100 billion worth of Corps projects, flood emergencies, damages and deaths are on the rise, and the federal government is spending more money than ever to move Americans out of harm's way. Meanwhile, most of the wetlands of the Mississippi basin have been drained by farmers or paved by developers, often with Corps permits. That means that most of the runoff from 31 states and two Canadian provinces now flows straight to the river, which means that it takes less water to create a horrific flood.

"We could be headed for 1927 all over again," warned Ron Nassar, coordinator of the Lower Mississippi Valley Conservation Committee, a group representing natural resource agencies from eight states. "This is a turning point for the Corps."

Environmentalists and administration officials want the Corps to turn from structural flood "control" to non-structural flood damage reduction: buying and reforesting floodplain farmland, waterproofing and elevating homes and roads, leaving nature to its own devices and moving people away from water. The idea is to save wildlife while reducing the amount of marginal farmland and river's-edge development the government needs to bail out after floods, and spending less money on giant engineering projects.

The president's Council on Environmental Quality is no longer pressing to revamp the Corps approach to flood control. But it is still considering a move to hold up three particularly intrusive structural projects. One is the floodway plan in Missouri. The other two are in the Mississippi Delta itself: the Big Sunflower River dredging project and the Yazoo Pump. The $62 million Big Sunflower initiative could endanger an ancient mussel colony believed to be the world's densest concentration of living creatures. The original plan for the $181 million pump proposed to drain three times as much wetlands acreage as the floodway project in Missouri.

The three projects are all designed to divert water away from farmers, to help them increase their yields. But the farm economy is swooning, despite record yields and record levels of federal largess. Sam Hamilton, the Fish and Wildlife Service's Southeast regional director, recently suggested in a harsh letter to the Corps that the agrarian status quo is "unsustainable" and that its policies have been "instrumental in transforming" an ecologically vibrant Mississippi River ecosystem "into a region that is considered impoverished by most social, economic and environmental standards."

But even if Clinton does try to stop the projects before his term ends, he will have to contend with Emerson, not to mention Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), the protectors of the Delta projects. As Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) blurted out at a recent hearing, the Corps doesn't necessarily answer to the president. Voinovich, chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Corps, pointedly reminded his colleagues who really decides which water projects become reality.

"We don't care what the Corps cost-benefit is," Voinovich said. "We're going to build it anyhow because Congress says it's going to be built. Somebody's in charge of some appropriations committee, or another committee, and jams it through."

About This Series:

TODAY: LANDSCAPING AMERICA: How the Corps of Engineers has launched tens of billions of dollars worth of water projects around America, including many that damaged the environment.

MONDAY: CODDLING CONGRESS: How the Corps has developed quid-pro-quo relationships with key Congressmen, executing questionable projects in their districts and yielding to them on regulatory decisions.

TUESDAY: DREDGING FOR DATA: How Corps planners have manipulated environmental and cost-benefit studies to justify massive projects, including the dredging of ports in Baltimore and along the East Coast.

WEDNESDAY: PERMITTING POLLUTION: How the Corps has subordinated its responsibility to protect America's wetlands while granting thousands of permits for development in Alaska.

THURSDAY: RESTORING NATURE: How the Corps is seeking to reverse the damage it once did to Florida's Everglades, even as it struggles over its own future.East Prairie ProjectBy closing a gap in a levee and building two pumps, the Corps would help protect farmland near East Prairie but would do little to help the town itself. Its flooding problems are mostly caused by poor drainage of rainwater, not infiltration by the river. A small fraction of the project's cost would go to deepen a drainage ditch, which would provide some benefit to East Prairie.

SOURCES: Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Defense

The Corps' Controversial Projects

New Orleans Industrial Canal lock replacement

This $641 million project would be one of the most expensive locks ever built. It was justified in March 1997 by projections that barge traffic would gradually increase, even though traffic had been dropping for a decade. And it has continued to decline so fast that the project can no longer be justified with Corps data. The Corps also cited safety concerns, but the National Transportation Safety Board says the new lock "would not necessarily reduce the hazards." Local activists believe the 10-year project will ruin two historic black neighborhoods. But former House Appropriations Committee chairman Robert Livingston (R-La.) is pushing the project as a lobbyist for the Port of New Orleans, and the Corps is forging ahead.

Oregon Inlet jetties

The Corps wants to build two jetties to protect fishing boats in North Carolina's Outer Banks. The fleet has 215 commercial vessels, so the $108 million project, authorized in 1970, would cost about $500,000 per boat. The Interior Department believes it would cause serious erosion problems on Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and Cape Hatteras National Seashore, so it has refused to allow the Corps to build the jetties from its land. This summer, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) tried to slip an amendment into a budget bill to transfer the land to the Corps, but Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) blocked it.

Deer Creek Debris Basin

The Corps completed this Southern California flood control project in 1982, but it is embroiled in a new controversy. The project was supposed to cost $28 million and protect San Bernardino County neighborhoods from the kind of flood that happens once every 200 years. It ended up costing $140 million, and recent evaluations have found the basin will only withstand a 20-year flood. Robert Kirby, a former Corps employee who helped design the project, called the project unsafe in a recent affidavit: "I am very concerned that homes, business and schools could be damaged and people could suffer if the problems . . . are not rectified immediately."

Pentagon renovations

The Army Corps may be a Pentagon agency, but it was fired from the $1.2 billion Pentagon renovation project this year. Technically, it quit, but only after the Defense Department's project manager, Walker Lee Evey, sharply cut back its role, complaining that it wasn't flexible enough for the job. Evey says he constrained the Corps because it wasn't "responding to challenges," because it couldn't handle having a secondary role in the project, and because it represents "the old way of doing major construction projects."

Upper Mississippi lock expansions

Donald Sweeney, a Corps economist, led a five-year study of proposed $1 billion lock expansions on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. But when he concluded the costs would far outweigh the benefits, senior Corps commanders took him off the study. In February, The Post published Corps e-mails that showed how officials then launched a campaign "to develop evidence or data to support a defensible set of . . . projects," announcing that if the economics did not "capture the need for navigation improvements, then we have to find some other way to do it." The alleged misconduct is the subject of several investigations, and two independent economic analyses have upheld Sweeney's view that the project is unnecessary.

Apalachicola River navigation

The Corps has channelized dozens of rivers for barges that never arrived, and the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River system in Georgia and Florida is a conspicuous example. The Corps still spends nearly $3 million a year dredging it, killing fish and damaging endangered mussel beds, but it only floats a few barges a week. In January, when The Post chronicled the plight of "low-volume waterways" such as the Red, White and Missouri rivers, Assistant Army Secretary Joseph Westphal vowed to reevaluate the entire navigation system. Now he has made the A-C-F his first target, declaring in letters to Rep. Robert L. Barr Jr. (R-Ga.) and Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) that maintaining both rivers for barges is "not economically justified or environmentally defensible."

A Brief History of the Corps

1775: Gen. George Washington appoints a chief engineer to direct the fortification of Bunker Hill early in the Revolutionary War. The nation's engineers would participate in every American war that followed.

1802: President Thomas Jefferson establishes the Corps to run the nation's only engineering school, at West Point. The Corps also builds forts and coastal batteries, and leads early surveying expeditions of the West.

1824: Congress establishes a civil works program for the Corps, beginning with snagging and clearing the Ohio and Mississippi rivers for year-round navigation.

1861: The Civil War begins, featuring an all-star team of Corps alumni on both sides: Lee, McClellan, Meade, Johnston, Beauregard, Pope, Fremont. The end of the war ushers in a new era of civil works: river navigation, flood control levees, harbor improvements and surveys. The Corps also takes over public works for the war-torn District of Columbia, and completes the Washington Monument and Library of Congress.

1914: The Corps finishes digging the Panama Canal, a project abandoned by the French in 1889.

1928: Congress gives the Corps full power over the Mississippi River after the disastrous '27 flood. The New Deal launches another civil works frenzy, including giant dams on the Missouri, Illinois and Columbia rivers.

1941: The Corps helps lead America's mass mobilization for World War II, and supervises the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb. After the war, the Corps returns to civil works, building the St. Lawrence Seaway, Cape Canaveral and the canal system that drained the Everglades to supply South Florida's water, while designing and building Cold War missile sites and radar networks.

1972: Congress passes the Clean Water Act, requiring developers who want to dredge or fill America's wetlands to seek permits from the Corps. The agency continues to build huge dams on the Snake and Red rivers and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, but it also begins a few environmental restoration programs.

2000: The Pentagon investigates allegations that Corps officials rigged a $58 million study of Mississippi River improvements. The Clinton administration tries to reassert executive branch control of the Corps but retreats after furious opposition from Congress. The Corps prepares to lead a $7.8 billion project to undo some of the damage it did to the Everglades, the biggest environmental restoration plan in history.

Within the agency:$11 billion annual budget 8 geographic divisions 41 subordinate districts 34,500 civilian employees 600 military employees

The agency controls:11.7 million acres of land 12,000 miles of waterways 4,400 recreation areas 8,500 miles of levees 300 deep draft ports 75 operational hydropower projects

SOURCE: Army Corps of Engineers

Civil Works Spending

Breakdown of Corps' $4.1 billion civil works appropriations:

IN MILLIONS

$149 Other

$117 Regulatory program

$150 Radioactive waste cleanup

$162 Investigations

$309 Mississippi River and tributaries

$1,401 Construction

$1,854 Operations and maintenance

SOURCE: Army Corps of Engineers

The Constricted Floodplain

Corps levees along the Mississippi River and many of its tributaries have severed the river from more than 90 percent of its floodplain. The levees have cleared the way for productive farmland and vibrant cities, but they have also eliminated millions of acres of foraging and spawning habitat for scores of aquatic species and the animals that eat them.

SOURCE: Lower Mississippi River Conservation Committee