Sen. Lamar Alexander speaks to reporters and editors at the Chattanooga Times Free Press.U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said Wednesday that President BarackObama’s proposal to cut $1.4 billion from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ budget next year would set maintenance of the nation’s water infrastructure “back more than a decade,” and stall work on the Chickamauga lock again.
Alexander, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, said at a budget hearing that the U.S. should build on water infrastructure investments made in fiscal 2015 and 2016. Last year, Congress provided nearly $6 billion to the corps to invest in water infrastructure, which helped provide $29.9 million in the current fiscal year for building a new lock to replace the crumbling 75-year-old lock at Chickamauga Dam in Chattanooga.
After raising the barge fuel tax, revamping the corps funding formula and boosting the corps’ civil works budget over the past three years to reactivate work on the new and bigger Chickamauga lock, the Obama White House budget for fiscal 2017 cut out any funding to continue work on the new lock.
“This budget request is an enormous step backward,” Alexander said of the president’s spending plan for fiscal 2017. “In fact, if we simply approved the president’s request, the Corps of Engineers would receive less than what Congress appropriated in fiscal year 2006, setting us back more than a decade.”
The corps has 138 locks like Chickamauga that are more than 50 years old. But the inland waterways that use these locks “are the only way for many shippers to easily move things like grain, steel, fertilizer and coal up and down rivers, and having to unexpectedly shut them down for extended periods of time could be catastrophic for agriculture and other commodities that rely on the locks to get their goods to market,” Alexander said.
President Obama’s fiscal year 2017 budget request proposes to cut the Corps of Engineers’ budget by 23 percent.
“The biggest problem here is you are not spending the money you are collecting,” Alexander told corps officials during a budget hearing Wednesday.