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Tennessee: Different funding source may be needed to finish project

By: Dave Flessner
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Zach Wamp on lock

Beneath the 129-foot-high Chickamauga Dam, construction cranes have replaced sand cranes this summer as one of Chattanooga’s biggest and longest construction projects takes shape in the Tennessee River.

The foundation for a new and bigger lock through the dam should be completed over the next 15 months, Project Manager Wayne Huddleston said Monday.

“We’re moving ahead on time and on budget,” Mr. Huddleston said during a tour by lawmakers of the $374 million project.

But keeping the federally funded project on schedule for completion by 2014 will require the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to battle strong currents in both the Tennessee River and in Washington, D.C., politics.

“Annual battle”

Staff Photo by Dan Henry
Wayne Huddleston, the project manager overseeing the construction of the new Chickamauga Lock, left, speaks about progress of the $360 million replacement project Monday afternoon while standing on one of the coffer cells located on the North side of the Tennessee River.

U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., who has worked most of his 14 years in Congress to start and sustain funding for the replacement lock, said finishing the projected 11-year construction project “is an annual battle” in Congress.

“My goal is to keep working on this with all I have,” he said. “It’s an annual challenge to keep it funded through the appropriations process because we don’t fund infrastructure projects like we do battleships on the front end.”

Rep. Wamp said he hopes to form a coalition next year to come up with a new funding formula to build needed infrastructure, including dam, lock and other river projects by the Army Corps of Engineers.

“We are going to have to pursue other options and I believe we’re going to be able to do that,” Rep. Wamp said.

Dam and lock projects are typically funded equally by the U.S. Treasury and funds from fuel taxes paid by barge operators into the Inland Waterways Trust Fund.

Commercial shippers, towboat operators and inland boaters have paid more than $2 billion into the trust fund since its creation 30 years ago. But the fund balance is projected to shrink to only $22.2 million by the end of the current fiscal year and to begin to go into the red in future years, according to a March report to the Inland Waterways Users Board. Rising material costs for projects and a backlog of deferred repairs have caused the fund’s balance to drop.

Among others, major projects at the Olmsted Lock and Dam on the Ohio River in Illinois and the Kentucky Lock and Dam, about 20 miles upstream on the Tennessee River from Paducah, Ky., have proven more expensive than originally forecast, Rep. Wamp said.

The Bush administration proposed raising fuel taxes on barge operators to replenish the Inland Waterways Trust Fund. But Rep. Wamp said the proposal “is a nonstarter” with gasoline and diesel prices up dramatically over the past two years.

Lock a priority

Despite the shortfall in the trust fund, Chickamauga Lock still is getting $34.6 million this year and is projected to receive $42 million in fiscal 2009 because the project is one of the Corps’ top priorities. It also has benefited by direct congressional appropriations backed by Appropriation Committee members Rep. Wamp in the House and U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., in the Senate.

Lt. Col. Bernard Lindstorm, the director of the Nashville district of the Army Corps of Engineers, said the new Chickamauga lock “will bring the lock up to the standard size” of all other locks downstream from Chattanooga and thereby allow barge operators to take multibarge tows through the Chickamauga Dam in only a fraction of the current time.

If nothing is done, the deteriorating rock aggregate in the existing lock walls eventually will force the lock to be closed altogether, Mr. Lindstrom said. The current lock was completed along with the Chickamauga Dam in 1940.

Over the past decade and a half, the corps has spent more than $20 million to sustain the current lock with special tension rods and wall replacements. But within the next decade, TVA and Corps of Engineers experts predict that the current 68-year-old lock will have to be permanently closed, which could shut off river commerce from 318 miles of navigable river upstream of Chattanooga.

Mr. Huddleston said the new and bigger lock has a projected 6-to-1 benefit-to-cost ratio. The amount of freight projected to move through a new and bigger lock at Chickamauga will grow to 11.2 million tons by 2060, or nearly six times the current level, Mr. Huddleston said.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, which built the original Chickamauga Dam and lock, turned over the lock replacement project to the Corps of Engineers more than a decade ago. The corps first got funding to design and engineer the replacement lock in 2003 and has spent another couple of years rerouting Lake Shore Drive to prepare a staging area along the shore to help build the new lock.

Work progress

Last summer and this year, contractors for the Corps of Engineers are building small, rock-filled islands in the river to form new walls for a coffer dam to be completed by 2010. Within the coffer dam, water can be pumped out of the riverbed to allow the new lock chamber to be built.

The new lock, which will measure 110 feet by 600 feet, will include a guide wall that stretches downstream past the current railroad bridge.

The lock replacement is one of four major construction projects planned or under way in Chattanooga which collectively are valued at more than $2 billion.

In addition to the lock replacement, major local construction projects being built or planned include the $1 billion Volkswagen auto assembly plant at Enterprise South industrial park, the $330 million expansion of Memorial Hospital in Glenwood and the $299 million corporate campus by BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee on Cameron Hill.

“All of these projects have significant economic impacts to our region and serve as a magnet to draw even more business here,” said state Sen. Bo Watson, R-Chattanooga. “This lock has been a bottleneck for commerce and shipping and when this is opened up I think you’ll see a lot more businesses take advantage of the low-cost means of water shipment.”

Rep. Wamp said the local building boom should help Chattanooga weather the current economic slowdown better than many communities.

“Thankfully, at a time of a national downturn in the economy, things in the Tennessee Valley are moving forward in a very positive way,” Rep. Wamp said.

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