Proposed Authorization of Upper Mississippi River-Illinois Waterway Investments

Publication Date: November 2004

Publisher: Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service

Author(s):

Research Area: Environment

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Abstract:

Thirty-seven lock and dam sites and thousands of channel training structures create a 9-foot-deep, 1,200-mile-long navigation channel known as the Upper Mississippi River-Illinois Waterway (UMR-IWW) System. The UMR-IWW makes commercial navigation possible between Minneapolis and St. Louis on the Mississippi River, and along the Illinois Waterway from Chicago to the Mississippi River, thus facilitating low-cost barge transport of agricultural and other products to and from upper midwestern states. Since the 1980s, the system has experienced increasing traffic delays, raising concerns about competitiveness of U.S. products in some international markets. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), the agency responsible for the system, began studying the feasibility of navigation efficiency improvements in 1993. The study has been the subject of much controversy. In 2000, a Corps economist alleged that the agency manipulated analyses to support navigation investments, and a series of newspaper articles criticized the Corps' planning process for the UMR-IWW study and other Corps studies.

In response, the Corps halted the study, and reinitiated it in 2001 with a reformulated economic analysis and an ecosystem restoration objective. Ecosystem restoration was included to respond to criticisms that the study was too limited in its environmental analysis. The study objective for restoration is to identify measures that address ecosystem decline, including the ongoing effects of navigation operation and maintenance; the goal is to benefit a broad array of species by reducing the loss of habitat, habitat quality, and habitat diversity. Under the reformulated study, in September 2004, the Corps produced a final feasibility report recommending (1) a 50-year plan for combined navigation improvements and ecosystem restoration, and (2) authorization of an initial set of measures, including seven new locks, and an initial 15-year increment of restoration measures. The Corps recommended that the investments in the 50-year plan be made within an adaptive implementation framework, which would provide checkpoints for the Administration and Congress as more information was gained and project milestones were reached. The continuing debate over the urgency, necessity, and national benefit of expanded UMR-IWW navigation capacity now revolves around those recommendations.

Three pieces of legislation in the 108th Congress -- H.R. 4785, S. 2470, and S. 2773 (Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2004) -- would authorize combined investments in navigation ($1.73 billion) and ecosystem restoration ($1.46 billion). The final feasibility report and the bills differ from the standard Corps feasibility report and authorizing language. The bills authorize most of the initial set of activities recommended in the Corps' feasibility report; the authorization, however, is not contingent on a recommendation by the Chief of Engineers or a policy review by the Administration. A fourth bill -- H.R. 4686 -- proposes investing in UMR-IWW ecosystem restoration using an existing Environmental Management Program, without authorizing navigation improvements. This report compares the bills with each other and with the Corps' preferred plan. The report will be updated as warranted.