Sen. Lamar Alexander speaks to reporters and editors Friday at the Chattanooga Times Free Press.Construction of a new Chickamauga lock will move ahead this year with an extra $29 million of federal funds. But building the new and bigger river passageway through the Chickamauga Dam next year will need another $37 million – money that is not available in the White House budget plan for fiscal 2017.
The Obama administration’s proposed budget cuts overall spending for civil works projects by the Corps of Engineers and three higher priority dam and lock projects in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky mean no money is available in the president’s budget plan for the new Chickamauga lock.
During a hearing on the budget proposal this week, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., urged the Corps to do more to spend available funds on projects that it has started but which are not completed.
One of the rules of life Alexander said he learned from his father – and he said “would be good as well for the Corps of Engineers” – is “finish what you start.”
The Corps began building a new lock in Chattanooga in 2005 and has spent $216 million toward the estimated $858 million project. But work on the new lock was suspended for three years – and only $3 million was spent last year – due to funding cuts and higher priority dam and lock projects in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
Jo-Ellen Darcy, the U.S. assistant secretary of the Army who oversees civil works projects, agreed that the Corps should finish what it starts and agreed to reconsider how the agency calculates its benefit-cost ratio used to allocate resources.
“I think finishing what you have stated is a laudable goal,” Darcy said during a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C. “It’s just not one we are always able to achieve in the current fiscal situation.”
The Corps of Engineers, the federal agency responsible for building new inland waterway dams and locks, also has spent $471 million at the Kentucky Lock on the Tennessee River, which also was stalled due to a lack of money.
The Corps projects it could use $37 million next year for the next phase of building a new lock at the Chickamauga Dam to replace the existing, 75-year-old lock. The current lock is too small for multi-barge lockages, and it is suffering from “concrete growth” that is forcing the lock to be shut down more frequently for repairs.
The Chickamauga lock ranks fourth in priority among major inland waterway projects, behind the Olmsted Dam and Locks in Ohio, the dam and lock upgrade on the Lower Monongahela River in Pennsylvania and a new lock at the Kentucky Dam in Kentucky. Alexander said he is worried that the Corps could shift its priority and move the Chicka- mauga lock down even farther on its list of projects due to a less favorable benefit-cost ratio for the project than in the past.
The cost of building a new Chickamauga lock has more than doubled from original forecasts while barge usage of the lock has fallen by nearly 60 percent.
Alexander cautioned that the current benefit cost ratio may be “outdated or inappropriate” because the volume of shipments going through the Chickmauga lock has dropped as the problems with the existing lock have failed to be repaired.
“One big reason that the lock has gone from 2.7 million tons a year in the past to only about 1 million tons last year is because the lock is in bad shape and needs to be replaced,” said Alexander, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. “If you base your benefit-cost ratio on your current cargo, it would not be realistic because when you fix the lock, one would assume that you would be back up to some higher level.”
Darcy promised to deliver the new list of priority projects to the Congress later this month.
“In our rehabilitation programs, I don’t think we take into account the historical significance of these projects and I think we are losing some of those benefits in making a future calculation,” Darcy said. “As you know, rehabilitation programs don’t compete well in the current formula because they have a lower benefit-cost ratio. So I think we need to look at how we do the evaluations to determine our benefit-cost ratio and look at rehabilitation projects in a different way. We need to consider without that lock what would be lost.”
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfree press.com or at 423-757-6340.