July 27, 2007
by JOHN HEILPRIN
WASHINGTON - Senate and House negotiators reached agreement Friday on a bill authorizing Congress to spend about $20 billion for restoring the Louisiana coast and Florida's Everglades, upgrading navigation on the upper Mississippi River and improving flood control efforts nationally.
The Water Resources Development Act, which also would ensure that Army Corps of Engineers' water projects are based in economics and science, won strong backing in the Senate and House earlier this year. It has had trouble passing in recent years because of criticism of Corps operations and projects that some view as pork-barrel spending.
Final votes by both chambers to approve the compromise agreement are expected next week, before the August recess.
Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the senior Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the long overdue bill would improve the nation's water resources "in a fiscally responsible manner." Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who heads that panel, was unavailable for comment while traveling to Greenland to assess climate change.
The new agreement builds upon Inhofe's efforts to get the bill passed last year while he was chairman of the committee. As one of the key negotiators this year, Inhofe said that lawmakers also took a serious look at inland and intracoastal waterway projects.
The Senate authorized a $14 billion bill; the House version came to $15 billion. Congressional staff said the final authorization probably would top out closer to $20 billion, with most of the extra authorization money going toward drinking water and wastewater treatment plant projects.
About one-fourth of the authorized money, some $3.5 billion, would go to Katrina-damaged Louisiana. The upper Mississippi and Illinois River area would get $1.95 billion for seven new locks and $1.7 billion for ecosystem restoration. The bill also includes more than $2 billion for projects in California and $2 billion for Florida, with most of that for Everglades restoration.
The agreement also includes almost $900 million for hurricane protection in the Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes in Louisiana, which would help safeguard more than 120,000 people and 1,700 square miles of land against storm surge, said Sen. David Vitter, R-La.
It also has $298 million for improvements to the Trinity River basin in Dallas, said Rep. Eddie Bernie Johnson, D-Texas, who heads the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee where the House version of the bill originated.
"Correcting problems today saves us money tomorrow, because the problems only get worse and their solutions only grow more expensive over time," she said.
When Congress passed the original water project act in 1986, lawmakers envisioned it would be renewed every two years. But the last such renewal was in 2000. "Controversy always seemed to arise that dashed our hopes for a new authorization bill," Rep. John L. Mica, R-Fla., said.
In May, the Senate approved the bill on a vote of 91-4. A similar bill passed the House in April on a 394-25 vote. The bill won't provide guaranteed funding, however, because the money for what's authorized in the bill would have to be appropriated later.
"This is not the bill that any of us in the room would have written, if we were writing a bill by ourselves," Mica said. "However, it is a bill that all of us can support because it addresses important needs of our nation."