By TIM ALEXANDER
Illinois Correspondent

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Reaction from agriculture industry associations and a waterways group was swift and severe last week, to an effort by the Izaak Walton League, Sierra Club and the Prairie Rivers Network to persuade Congress to deauthorize construction of seven new locks on the Illinois and upper Mississippi Rivers.

Construction of the locks was authorized by the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2008, but no money has been appropriated for the project. Instead of spending money to upgrade the nation’s inland waterway system’s aged and crumbling locks and dams, the funds would be better spent on ecological and environmental projects along the river corridors, the groups said.
“For more than 100 years, structures meant to enhance navigation have severely degraded the environment both within and around the Mississippi and Illinois rivers,” said the Sierra Club’s Christine Favilla, in a news release dated Feb. 23. “Now is the time to ramp up the restoration efforts of this valuable resource, not give in to fiscal insanity.”

Brad Walker of the Izaak Walton League said lock restoration projects don’t make any sense. “Barge traffic has decreased steadily for more than 20 years and the locks are sitting idle most of the time. Why would we spend $2 billion to replace locks with that much extra capacity?” he asked.

“We’re calling on Congress to pull the plug on the new locks and to stop holding river restoration hostage to unneeded navigation spending,” added the Prairie River Network’s Glynnis Collins.
The prepared statement and the release of a report calling for an end to lock-and-dam projects authored by the three groups and other coalition partners – viewable online at http://iwla.org/bigprice – was timed to coincide with a waterways users meeting held in Washington, D.C., last week. Those who helped fight the decade-plus battle to gain WRDA’s passage were quick to defend the need for new 1,200-foot locks to replace outdated and deteriorating 600-foot locks constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.

“We have hamstrung our interior waterways for a number of years by the fact that we haven’t invested adequately in them, and the locks are now in varying stages of disrepair,” said Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition.

“While we’ve studied this for 15 years, Brazil and Argentina have been building roads, building rail and dredging their rivers,” added Paul Rohde, vice president of the St. Louis-based Waterways Council, Inc. “(The delay) comes at the expense of American producers.

“These groups want us to continue to do nothing while our global competitors continue to invest in their infrastructure and continue to eat away American farmers’ advantage in global grain trade.”
Steenhoek said the United States needs to begin upgrading the locks soon and that the time for debate had passed.

“When the third channel of the Panama Canal is completed in 2014, it will double the size of ships that can transit that artery. That is going to have significant ramifications on our own (shipping) logistics, and if we don’t have a corresponding investment in our infrastructure, we’ll be essentially just shifting the bottleneck from the Panama Canal to somewhere in the U.S.,” he added.

Garry Niemeyer, a director for the National Corn Growers Assoc. (NCGA) from Auburn, Ill., pointed out that WRDA, when passed, specified millions of dollars be set aside for river ecosystem development and the presence of locks and dams enhances both the environment and local economies.

“There are significant environmental benefits to the inland waterway system, in that the backwaters created by the lock and dam systems support more than 40 percent of the migratory foul and fish breeding grounds and are home to more than 500 miles of wildlife refuge,” said Niemeyer, a past president of the Illinois Corn Growers Assoc. (ICGA).

“In addition, more than $1 billion are generated each year through recreational uses such as hunting, fishing and tourism.”
Niemeyer also spoke of the economic boost new lock construction would give to the skilled trades industry.

“It will take 48 million man-hours of labor just to build the locks, and another 25 million man-hours just to do the (environmental) restoration along the river system,” he said. “Building the locks would be huge for this country, and it is something we can do for the benefit of this country’s goods and services.”

Steenhoek and others feel the Izaak Walton League, Sierra Club and other “environmental” groups hope to severely diminish the use of the rivers for commercial purposes.

“The ultimate objective for these types of groups ... is to move from a navigational use of our interior waterways to a recreational and environmental preservation model.

That’s the ultimate concern we have,” Steenhoek said.

“Most of these folks would just as soon we blow the locks and dams up and not use them for any commercial purposes,” remarked a former ICGA official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Rohde, who along with Niemeyer attended the waterways meeting in Washington last week and spent time lobbying Capitol Hill lawmakers for WRDA appropriations, said most legislators were unaware of the group’s appeal to Congress to deauthorize new lock construction, and that he doesn’t lend much weight to the groups’ ideas.

“I don’t think they’ll have any impact whatsoever. They’ve already proven themselves to be part of a marginalized minority.
They don’t have any credence with any of the decision makers on the Hill, and they certainly don’t reflect the thinking of most Americans,” Rohde said.

Niemeyer reported that of the 10 lawmakers he spoke with in Washington last week, all promised their support of appropriations for WRDA funding.

“The real challenge for us is the economy, the cuts in non-defense discretionary spending and the fact that this is a new start and we have a lot of core projects that need to be finished up,” said Rohde.

The Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, the Waterways Council, the American Soybean Assoc., the Corn Refiners Assoc., the National Assoc. of Wheat Growers, the NCGA, the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, The Fertilizer Institute, the U.S. Rice Federation and various skilled trade labor unions are among the organizations in support of replacing the nation’s outdated locks and dams. In addition, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has pledged his support for WRDA.