Bill would eliminate navigation contributions toward inland waterway infrastructure
Editor’s note: The following is an e-mail from Olivia Dorothy, regional conservation coordinator for the Upper Mississippi River Initiative, Izaak Walton League of America, regarding a house bill aimed at eliminating “navigation contributions toward inland waterway infrastructure.”
Tomorrow the House Transportation Committee will be voting on the WAVE4 Act, which will all but eliminate navigation contributions towards inland waterway infrastructure. I’m sorry this is such short notice. Below is language you can use when contacting Representatives on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Attached is a spreadsheet with the Committee member names and email addresses for the Chiefs of Staff. If you have time, please reach out to the Committee and let them know you OPPOSE HR 4342.
Vote NO on H.R. 4342!
The WAVE4 Act (H.R. 4342) will shift the burden for funding costly inland waterway infrastructure expenses onto taxpayers, possibly leaving taxpayers on the hook for over $10 billion over the next 20 years! The WAVE4 Act will not fund necessary work to maintain the locks and dams and increase the backlog of infrastructure projects.
Oppose H.R. 4342 because it
1. Eliminates cost share for dam construction and rehabilitation.
Currently, dam rehabilitation and construction are funded through a 50-50 cost share between taxpayers and the Inland Waterway Trust Fund. Navigation argues that they should not pay to maintain and construct dams because other user groups benefit from the dams. But, the dams were built and continue to be maintained primarily for navigation. In this tough economic time, the federal government cannot afford for industry to reduce their contribution.
2. Eliminates cost share for lock rehabilitation.
H.R. 4342 states that navigation will contribute 50% of the cost of lock rehabilitation over $100 million, but it’s a trap! Their have been 16 lock rehabilitation projects since the Inland Waterway Trust Fund was established and the average cost of a lock rehabilitation project is $30 million. No lock rehabilitation project has ever approached $100 million and no future lock project is expected to cost $100 million. So, this is just another attempt to push even more costs onto taxpayers and increase the federal deficit.
3. Eliminates cost share for cost overruns.
Cost overruns are a certainty for every Corps construction project. Projects on the Ohio River have seen overruns of 100% to over 200%. Most of these overruns are due to poor planning and inadequate funding. So, instead of punishing taxpayers and forcing the federal government to pick up the tab, the Corps needs to improve their planning process and produce more reliable cost estimates.
4. Increases the fuel tax to only $0.26 per gallon.
The Inland Marine Transportation System (IMTS) Team calculated that a tax increase to $0.50 per gallon would be necessary to fund their $15 billion wish list of projects, called the 20-year Capitol Investment Strategy. But, instead of a good faith attempt to help reduce the project backlog, they are only offering to fund lock expansion. At least on the upper Mississippi River, locks are currently functioning at less than half their capacity on most of the river. Navigation traffic would have to double before lock expansion would be economically justified.
5. Recommends the Army adopt the IMTS Team 20-year investment strategy.
The 20-year investment strategy lists almost 150 lock and dam construction and rehabilitation projects that will cost $15 billion over the next 20 years. But, if H.R. 4342 passes, navigation will contribute only $5 billion for these projects, while taxpayers will be on the hook for $10 billion plus the cost of overruns! If the cost overrun trend continues, this could mean that taxpayers could be on the hook for $20-30 billion over the next 20 years. Several of the projects on the list have not been funded by Congress because they are not economically justified. Instead of increasing costs for unnecessary projects that are environmentally damaging, let’s re-evaluate project priorities, planning and funding to alleviate the backlog of projects.
Response to the Briefing Memo for the Hearing “How Reliability of the Inland Waterways System Impacts Economic Competitiveness”
The Briefing Memo and find it full of misrepresentations and misinformation. Therefore we are providing a short list of bulleted fact checks to supplement the Committee. Below is a listing of several of the erroneous or misleading statements contained in the Briefing Memo countered by the facts:
Misrepresentation: Barges are more fuel efficient and less polluting than other means of transportation.
Fact: Barges are no more efficient than average trains and when compared with unit trains barges are significantly less efficient than trains. Since pollution is directly calculated from fuel efficiency, barges also have no advantage over trains in this respect.
Misrepresentation: Barge cost savings of $12.00 per ton over alternate overland modes
Fact: Barges are heavily subsidized; at least 90 percent of the systems costs are paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, by far the most subsidized mode of transportation. If the navigation industry paid an equivalent cost for constructing and maintaining the Inland Waterways System as the rail industry must for the rail system the Inland Waterways System users’ savings would be significantly reduced, possibly completely disappear. The navigation industry also pays nothing towards the restoration of the rivers that the system it uses has severely damaged; again this cost is paid solely by the taxpayers.
Misrepresentation: Condition of the Inland Waterways System, “nearly 60% of these facilities have been in service for longer than 50 years, while almost 40% are more than 70 years old.”
Fact: the vast majority of the locks have been rehabilitated, all of the locks on the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) have been rehabilitated within the last 20 years and have decades of useful life remaining. Each completed rehabilitation extends that useful life and allows the facility to function efficiently; the locks are not falling apart.
Misrepresentation: The lockage delays on the UMR and Illinois River are severe.
Fact: The Inland Waterways System has no scheduling system, the only major transportation system in the country that does not have a system. We schedule planes and trains but the navigation industry seems to be incapable of setting up a logical schedule system to improve its efficiency. However, because barge transportation has dropped so dramatically over the last decade or so on the UMR there has been decreased interest by the Corps of Engineers to pursue this useful measure. Also, the Benefit-Cost calculations for the proposed new 1,200 locks on the UMR are essentially negative – the completion of the locks would cause U.S. taxpayers a significant loss on their funding of the project.
Misrepresentation: The decline in the Inland Waterways Trust Fund (IWTF) to near zero creating a backlog of authorized yet unconstructed projects. Since 1986 the time to complete projects has dramatically increased.
Fact: The IWTF, which was not used to pay for Inland Waterways System projects until 1986, has never had an adequate contribution from the navigation industry to support the enormous wish list of the industry. The current $0.20 fuel tax contribution provides 50 percent of the systems funding but has not been increased for 18 years. Prior to 1986 the taxpayers fully subsidized the Inland Waterways System projects. It is the industries inability or unwillingness to provide adequate funding to the IWTF that has been the cause of the funding restrictions.
Misrepresentation: The need for approving the Inland Waterways Users Board Recapitalization Plan that would increase funding for the system to $380 million annually.
Fact: The Inland Marine Transportation System (IMTS) plan prepared by the Users Board is simply a means to increase the 90 percent subsidy of the Inland Waterways System even closer to the 100 percent that they enjoyed prior to 1986. The removal of all costs obligations for the IWTF related to dams, lock rehabilitations under $100 million (there has never been a lock rehabilitation over $100 million), and project cost overruns while offering a miserly $0.06 increase in the fuel tax is specious at best. This proposal does nothing for the country but increase the burden on U.S. taxpayers by an estimated $200 million per year.
Most of the above facts above were covered in the attached report released in 2010, “Big Price – Little Benefit” that we suggest the committee review before making any decisions on the Inland Waterways System.
Olivia Dorothy
Regional Conservation Coordinator
Upper Mississippi River Initiative
Izaak Walton League of America
Posted April 18, 2012
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3 Comments
Wow! I’m amazed at the laziness now passing as journalism. This email is riddled with misinformation that is either (a) a lack of understanding by Ms. Dorothy on the issues, or (b) a disingenuous misrepresentation of the facts – the most obvious being that the locks on the Upper Miss and Illinois River are in good shape. To print this email without investigating into the facts is irresponsible, at best.
Editor’s note: The Rock River Times received the following comment via e-mail:
April 29, 2012
TO: Editor, Rock River Times
FR: Debra Colbert, Waterways Council, Inc.
RE: Article refutation
I was dismayed to find your article (April 18), “Bill would eliminate navigation contributions toward inland waterway infrastructure,” that is based upon an e-mail from Olivia Dorothy, regional conservation coordinator for the Upper Mississippi River Initiative, Izaak Walton League of America. Ms. Dorothy is poorly informed in her memo about the inland waterways industry and she incorrectly attempts to refute the value of this system. The FACTS about the value of this system to the nation are included in a recent research study conducted by the Texas Transportation Institute, “A Modal Comparison of Domestic Freight Transportation Effects on the General Public: 2001-2009.” (attached).
These are the facts:
• One standard 15-barge river tow has the same capacity as 1,050 trucks and 216 rail cars pulled by six locomotives. Think of the impact on your daily commute home today if there were no barges to move our critical commodities.
• Barges can now move a ton of cargo 616 miles with a single gallon of fuel, while trains can travel 476 and trucks 150 ton-miles per gallon. This mode is the most fuel-efficient going today.
• This is also the safest mode: after adjusting for the differences in quantity of cargo moved by each mode, for each member of the public injured in a barge accident, 95.3 are injured in rail accidents and 1,609.6 are injured in truck accidents. For fatalities, the rates are 132 trucking fatalities and 18.1 rail fatalities for every barge related fatality. .
• Inland waterways transport is the most environmentally-friendly mode and generates fewer emissions of particulate matter, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide than rail or truck on a per ton mile moved basis.
The Rock River Times claims it is the “voice of the community,” but to publish this kind of article without the benefit of the other research and fact-based side to inject balance is not offering much value to your readers. And if our nation’s waterways and its infrastructure were gone, your community’s voice would be drowned out by traffic congestion, stymied by poor air quality, and lost to fewer jobs.
Thank you.
Editor’s note: Following is a response from the original author, Olivia Dorothy, in response to the reply by Debra Colbert:
- The source – Texas Transportation Institute, “A Modal Comparison of Domestic Freight Transportation Effects on the General Public: 2001-2009″ – was funded by the National Waterways Foundation and the report is full of biases that favor inland navigation.
- Barges are not the most fuel efficient mode of transportation, the unit grain train gets 640 ton-miles per gallon. And, barges must travel much longer distances because rivers do not run in straight lines. So, trains and trucks can arrive at a destination much faster. The time in transit also impacts fuel efficiency and when that is taken into account, barges only get 417-443 miles to the gallon, less efficient than trains by your estimate. Check out http://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/topics/estimatesoftotalfuelconsumption.htm.
- I appreciate the barge industry concern with greenhouse gas emissions, but carbon dioxide is not the only environmental threat. Below is a list of some of the other environmental problems created by inland waterway navigation.
Barges facilitate and promote the establishment of invasive species.
- The Great Lakes spends over $200 million annually on invasive species removal and mitigation thanks to inland transportation (www.glc.org).
- The dams on the river create ideal habitat for Asian carp because they limit water discharge variability (Michael Hoff, et al. Management Implications from a Stock-Recruitment Model for Bighead Carp in Portions of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers)
Dams increase sedimentation.
- The dams slow down water on the river, causing sediment to drop out of the water column, reducing aquatic habitat variability and smothering benthic organisms like the many threatened and endangered mussels in the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers.
- As sedimentation builds up, the water outside the navigation channel becomes shallower, eventually creating mudflats and impacting recreation along the river.
- Much of this sediment is fine silts, and when tows move through the silt is stirred up, limiting viability for fish and reducing sunlight plants need for photosynthesis.
River training structures increase flooding
- weirs, dikes and dams cause water levels to increase to facilitate navigation. But, during a flood they cause water stage to increase even higher. Exacerbating the flood, causing an increase in property damage and loss of life.
Dams reduce water flow variability
- Many native species depend on the river’s seasonal fluctuations for their life cycle, but the dams prevent these fluctuations. This makes it harder for native species to live and reproduce, while invasives (like Asian carp) become more successful.
Thank you for the opportunity to respond.
Olivia Dorothy
Regional Conservation Coordinator – Upper Mississippi River
Izaak Walton League of America
217-390-3658
odorothy@iwla.org