The Post on the Army Corps -- again

Got to give the devil his due. Michael Grunwald and the Washington Post headline writers weighed in with a decent analysis this morning of the Army Corps' failure to shore up the New Orleans levees. I had criticized Grunwald a few days ago for his previous series on Army Corps pork, my argument being essentially that his award-winning series of a few years ago failed to separate the wheat from chaff when discussing infrastructure projects.

Today's headline, "Money Flowed to Questionable Projects: State Leads in Army Corps Spending, but Millions Had Nothing to Do With Floods," summed up the situation.

When Congress sits down to apportion the Army Corps pie, they think up all kinds of phony justifications for dubious projects that have little to do with improving the nation's economy. Using specious cost benefit analysis, they are able to justify an Alaskan bridge to a virtually uninhabited island, or, in the case of New Orleans, a series of expanded locks for grain barges that never come.

But this is only half an analysis. The press is still remiss in failing to hammer at what needs to be done to begin correcting the collapsing infrastructure in the U.S., from levees in New Orleans to bridges falling down on Connecticut interstates. Our infrastructure is falling apart after decades of neglect. The billions that do get spent go to projects that pad the bottom lines of special interests who either benefit from building a project or benefit from its completion.

Even with these misplaced priorities, we shouldn't be surprised that Louisiana leads the nation in scoring Army Corps projects. The Mississippi Delta drains the water system for nearly two-thirds of the U.S. land mass. We are just beginning to hear about the havoc the destruction in New Orleans will play with U.S. farm exports. The Gulf region produces two-thirds of our domestic oil and natural gas.

Yet protecting the infrastructure for these crucial industries depends first and foremost on protecting the city and region they called home. But instead of insisting on that basic maintenance, the oil and ag-barge lobbies connived with local politicians to spend the money on their own narrow interests. Low-income neighborhoods in New Orleans were the last things on their minds.

I'm sure they'd all agree now that theirs was a rather short-sighted view.

Posted by gooznews at September 8, 2005 09:37 PM