First, someone should have told Republican U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann years ago not to put on that hard hat during his photo op at the Chickamauga lock with U.S. Army Corp of Engineer engineers -- fellows who really do look like they need hard hats to protect the important stuff in their heads.
Second, someone should have told Tennessee's 3rd District Congressman not to reuse his photo-op hard hat picture time and time again while campaigning that he has worked "tirelessly" to "fix" the 75-year-old, eroding lock, especially since he largely did nothing to help get work on the lock restarted until 2013. That was when his third election season was upon him and he finally had viable competition and he suddenly remembered there was an aging lock that facilitates cheap transportation of billions of dollars in goods from upper East Tennessee south to the Gulf and north to Paducah, Ky., and on to the Mississippi River.
But thirdly -- and the clincher: Someone should have told Chuck to never, ever try to brand himself to something not yet done. The new and improved remake of what locals fondly call the Chick Lock is far from done -- and it's ever-growing price tag is still unfunded, yet Chuck has chosen to remake the lock's nickname with his own.
"The Chickamauga Lock, affectionately known by many as the Chick Lock, is now being referred to all over the United States as the 'Chuck' lock," Fleischmann quipped to the Chattanooga Rotary Club on Thursday as he pledged to work toward gaining at least $6.9 million in funding in the next year to reactivate work on the stalled replacement.
To borrow a campaign debate quote from Mary Headrick, made about the stalled lock funding that was gummed up in part because of Fleischmann's no-new-taxes pledge to Grover Norquist:
"This is appalling on so many levels that it leaves one nearly speechless," she said in October.
It's still true today.
We've known since at least 2000 that the current lock is both too small for the today's barges and barge traffic but also is in serious decay from a condition known as "concrete growth," a chemical reaction between the concrete of the lock and the river's water and bedrock. The problem is causing the lock's stability to erode.
In 2000, Corps officials said the lock would be unsafe by 2005. At that time, they estimated the replacement cost at about $300 million. The lock was closed for a time last fall for emergency repair when the gates failed. The idled replacement lock construction (for which we've already spent about $180 million) sits alongside the ailing lock still waiting on restart money and the total cost of the lock replacement has now almost tripled to $860 million.
The Corps of Engineers had run out of money because of cost overruns on other Corps projects, combined with declining fuel tax collections during the Great Recession. Tennessee's Sen. Lamar Alexander proposed a partial "fix" for the Corps funding mechanism, the Inland Waterways Trust Fund, to change the funding priorities formula. With Alexander leading, Fleischmann, the sole Tennessee representative on the House Appropriations Committee, finally in May worked to get the votes for that change. But both Alexander and Fleischmann said they knew the funding formula change was not enough to get work started again on our lock. A second stream of revenue would be needed to pump up the Inland Waterways Trust Fund, which is funded by both barge fuel taxes and federal appropriations.
Alexander backed the barge industry-pushed plan to raise the fuel tax on barges by 6 to 9 cents a gallon. Fleischmann couldn't support that because he had, years before, signed the Grover Norquist "no new taxes" pledge. And even when Alexander began calling the tax a "user fee," Fleischmann refused to say he supported it until October of last year.
On the day the lock gates failed (the same day of his general election debate with Headrick in Chattanooga) he finally said he would support that "user fee."
In December, he did. The tax, er user fee, was attached to the ABLE Act -- a sure-bet-to-pass bill allowing the parents and grandparents of disabled people to establish tax-free savings accounts for their care.
Now he wants to rebrand the Chick Lock as the Chuck Lock.
It should make us worry about how much longer your "tireless" work will delay the lock's replacement, and how much more money your "no-tax" pledge will cost us.