Army brats: The Corps of Engineers has too much power and
too little sense.

By Patrick O'Hannigan
web posted August 12, 2002

Novelist Ernest Hemingway once told aspiring writers to learn
from the example of Zen painters, who allegedly paint hawks in
flight by applying only a streak of blue to an otherwise empty
canvas. Given a scrap of summer sky, viewers are expected to
fill in the details for themselves.

Hemingway admired this minimalist technique because he
understood that it could be applied to writing, too. What is not
said can be as important as what is said. With that in mind, little-
known federal comments about a recently resolved squabble
over the Home Depot store in my town make the Army Corps
of Engineers look bad indeed.

In commentary published recently by our daily fish wrap, the
commanding officer for the local office of the Army Corps of
Engineers explained that his agency had challenged a Home
Depot construction project for violating provisions of the Clean
Water Act. When a handful of local environmentalists
complained that widening an existing road and creating a parking
lot for the new store would harm more than the three acres of
wetlands covered by the applicable subset of federal rules, the
Army simply did what it thought it had to do.

In a mis-timed effort at damage control, the columnist
acknowledged a court ruling that the construction permit
originally granted to a developer had been improperly revoked.
No matter, he argued, the government had acted in good faith. In
his words, "although the court determined that the manner in
which the Army revoked the permit was incorrect, the court did
not prevent the Army from carrying out its statutory duty to
enforce permit violations under the Clean Water Act."

Some of those who watched the original contretemps from the
cheap seats correctly assumed that the Army is more likely to
prosecute permit violations than to enforce them. But ill-chosen
verbs are small things next to the question of whether any
government agency should feel vindicated simply because
another arm of government doesn't question its mission. Is it
okay to embrace error as long as your existence goes
unchallenged? One hopes civil servants would set the bar a little
higher.

I hold no brief for Home Depot or any other company whose
clerks drive forklifts through cavernous aisles for the convenience
of municipal bean counters grasping at sales tax revenue and
people unhappy with their local hardware stores. But America
remains, at least in theory, a free country, and I'm not inclined to
give government the benefit of doubt just because it means well.

The Corps of Engineers puts projects that have substantial
environmental impact through a review that includes consultation
with other agencies, considerations of endangered species, and
soliciting input from the public. The review process seems
reasonable enough unless you're familiar with the agency's
bipartisan reputation for impressive wastefulness.

This past March, Senators Robert Smith (R-NH), Russell
Feingold (D-WI) and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced the
Corps of Engineers Modernization and Improvement Act of
2002. They were motivated in part by investigative reporting
from the Washington Post, which on February 24, 2000
published a story revealing that senior Corps officials had a
secret plan to expand their operating budget by fifty percent over
the next five years.

A watchdog group called Taxpayers for Common Sense
summarizes the Washington Post findings as follows: "The Corps'
primary missions are navigation, flood control, and environmental
restoration, but in recent years the agency has increased its
involvement in irrigation, water supply, wastewater treatment,
Superfund cleanups, and even construction and renovation of
public schools."

None of the new mission areas has traditionally been a federal
responsibility, but that hasn't stopped Corps bureaucrats from
expanding their power base while whispering like Elmer Fudd in
wabbit hunting season.

If you're going to argue with developers about whether drainage
ditches are federally-protected wetlands (as the Corps did in my
town), you have to be vewy vewy qwiet about your huge and
growing backlog of authorized but unbuilt projects.

In the mid-Nineties, the Army Corps of Engineers complained
that Granite City, Illinois builder Steve Lathrop was wrong for
trying to make a profit on land he had converted from a garbage
dump into a wildlife sanctuary, a lake, and a housing tract. Nan
Robbins of Tennessee was told by a Corps inspector that mud
on her shoes after a rain was evidence enough to call her land a
swamp.

Since then, people who plot political strategy for the Corps by
reading polls with all the veracity of tea leaves and chicken
entrails have occasionally pushed for looser environmental
regulations. Push come to shove, however, and neither the Oval
Office occupant nor public sentiment matters at all, because the
Army Corps of Engineers remains an agency bent on preserving
its stranglehold on anything related to public works. So what if its
portfolio includes projects like Optima Lake in Oklahoma, a
fifty-million dollar boondoggle shunned by tourists, hunters,
boaters, migratory geese, and every other constituency worth the
name?

In my own backyard 200 miles north of the California metropolis
named for Our Lady, Queen of Angels, lawsuits filed in the wake
of devastating floods some years ago accused the obstreperous
agency of mismanaging projects in the Pajaro River Watershed.
Failures there and elsewhere don't matter, however, because the
Corps of Engineers has "mission commitment" enough to impress
even Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Terminator" character.
 
There is much to be said for the argument that Congress never
intended to delegate wildlife habitat protection authority to the
Corps of Engineers, which became the muscle for the
Environmental Protection Agency only by willfully
misunderstanding a useful little doctrine called "separation of
powers." Outside the few local businesses that pride themselves
on serving shade-grown coffee, that argument against the
grasping ambition of federal engineers is almost as popular as "tri
tip"-style beef and the raven-haired meteorologist whose down-
home beauty has graced local airwaves for years.

Patrick O'Hannigan (plaiddude@hotmail.com) is a columnist for
"New Times" in San Luis Obispo, California.

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