The Chickamauga Dam lock replacement is stalled because of a lack of federal funding.Nothing illustrates this country’s gummed up leadership better than the stalled Chickamauga Dam lock.
The existing lock, which TVA built and opened in 1940, is suffering from “concrete growth” due to a chemical reaction in its rock aggregate with river water. The crumbling lock walls inside the lock chamber could render it unsafe within the next decade.
When work began to build a new lock alongside the old one in 2006, the completion cost was estimated at $375 million over five years. By 2013, the builder — the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — said $183 million had been spent already and the new completion estimate was $693 million. But, by then, the Corps had run out of building money. What the Corps had left was being spent on other, higher-priority dam repairs. The Corps said Chickamauga lock can still be completed in five years once money becomes available.
Of course, the cost of completing the lock will go up again and again as time passes. That phenomenon of time and money that we call inflation is exactly why the Corps ran out of money for the Chickamauga project in the first place. Funding was delayed and material costs increased. A mirror-image scenario played out across the nation.
Similar cost overruns on other Corps projects, combined with declining fuel tax collections during the Great Recession, left the Corps’ Inland Waterways Trust Fund without enough money to complete any of its projects other than the Olmsted dam and lock project on the Ohio River.