A Greener Corps?
WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 – A young tourist arrived in Emerald Isle last summer eager to kick off her shoes and let her feet sink into the fine, white sand beaches for which North Carolina is famous.
Although the sand looked a bit darker than she expected, she bounded onto the beach-only to sink into a soup-like, thigh-high sludge that left her immobilized.
“She was lucky to be able to get herself out,” said Emily Farmer, an Emerald Isle resident and one of the activists who has opposed a dredging project, authorized by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has left the town’s beaches spoiled and the townspeople divided.
Residents narrowly voted in favor of a 2002 referendum for a beach “renourishment” project which supporters said would rescue eroding beaches and preserve area tourism. The Corps provided the permit, but when the independent contractor began pumping sand onto the beach from an off-shore spot, people were shocked by the results.
“People are kicking and screaming and saying, ‘What are you doing to the beach?’” Farmer said. “They haven’t destroyed the whole beach yet, but they sure are working on it.”
For many Emerald Isle residents, the experience with the Corps of Engineers has been frustrating. They accuse the agency of issuing the permit too quickly and failing to follow up to make sure the work was done correctly.
It’s the kind of experience that has prevented the Corps from shaking an unfavorable reputation among environmental groups. But Corps officials point to a growing environmental consciousness illustrated by projects like the restoration of the Sagamore Salt Marshes and, more broadly, stricter operating guidelines.
Now, many Cape Cod residents are carefully watching the Corps, which will determine whether Cape Wind can proceed with its ambitious renewable energy project in Nantucket Sound, a local controversy that has grabbed national headlines. Many wonder which experience Cape Codders will have: Emerald Isle’s or Sagamore’s.
But at $700 million the stakes for the wind farm dwarf those of smaller dredging and restoration ventures. Proposed in 2001, the Cape Wind project would consist of 130 wind turbines in Horseshoe Shoals that would produce, on average, roughly 75 percent of the Cape’s electricity demand. The Corps is the deciding body under Section 10 of the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act, which requires Corps approval for any construction in navigable waters.
Corps officials admit that environmental sensitivity often played second fiddle to efficient engineering in their projects for almost 200 years – if it mattered at all.
But in 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Protection Act and the Corps had a new charge: the environmental impact of every Corps project had to be taken into account before work commenced.
An old dog – one that since 1775 had proudly built much of the country’s infrastructure – would need to learn some new tricks.
It is an agency where nearly 34,000 civilians work for the military, thereby enjoying the government’s muscle, but also having to heel when ordered to do so.
Best-known for building spectacular projects, the Corps completed the Washington Monument and oversaw construction of the Panama Canal. Its engineers managed the Manhattan project, helping produce the first atomic bomb, and when President Kennedy declared that he wanted to put a man on the moon, the government turned to the Corps for help.
The Corps in 1928 rescued an abandoned Cape Cod Canal project, addressed its flaws and continues to play gatekeeper to the water body that separates the elbow of land from the rest of the country.
More than 15 Cape Cod harbors that greet mariners – in Edgartown and Falmouth, Harwich and Hyannis – were Corps projects and more recently its engineers have cleared explosives from Camp Wellfleet on the Cape Cod National Seashore and restored the Sagamore salt marshes.
For the Cape Wind project, the public has been invited to thumb through a nearly 4,000 page draft environmental impact statement for the proposed Cape Wind project that was prepared by the Corps with 16 cooperating agencies. Four town hall meetings were scheduled for citizens to provide feedback about the project and the review period was increased by 45 days.
Since 1970 the Corps has made significant operational changes intended to reflect a growing environmental concern. The number of staff scientists – biologists, archeologists and ecologists – has grown appreciably. An independent environmental advisory board was assembled that reports directly to the Corps commander. Restoration projects became a priority, environmental operating principles were created and district divisions assembled their own environmental branches.
Critics, however, describe the environmental changes as window dressing, and argue that the Corps remains a handmaiden to congressional members whose sole mission is to attract projects to their home states and districts. They point to Corps projects that went awry like the Emerald Isle fiasco as proof that the agency has not reformed a careless environmental past. Citizen concerns are not taken into account, opponents charge, and Corps lawyers defend against an endless string of environmental lawsuits, they say.
Martin Reuss, the senior Corps historian, knows the charges well, but said the environmental progress of the last 30 years is real.
Reuss said staff turnovers have cleared out many of the “old timers” who resisted environmental constraints. Sharpened expertise at state and local levels and tighter federal funding, he said, have forced the Corps to take on partnerships – often at the local level – a change that naturally produces stricter environmental regulation.
“I think today, we’re more concerned about ensuring a project from the get-go,” Reuss said. “Our cautionary partners are involved in the planning process and are trying to do what is good engineering but also responds to local needs.”
But Reuss also acknowledged that Corps employees are “good soldiers” who have superiors to whom they must report. “These policies and approaches are not developed by the Corps of Engineers in a vacuum,” Reuss said. “They are developed in accordance with the guidance of Congress and the executive branch.”
To Oliver Houck, a conservation lawyer who has sued the Corps many times, this union of civilian know-how and military might makes the Corps “the most schizoid agency in the federal domain.”
The former attorney for the National Wildlife Federation sat on the Corps environmental board in the mid-1970s and is now a professor at Tulane University law school. He has frequently wrangled with the Corps about its projects in the Mississippi delta and accused Reuss of living in a “Washington dream world.”
“Their construction program is the plaything of Congress,” Houck said, adding that the Corps often behaves like “just another highway department sucking mud and laying concrete.”
He said that if any environmental progress has been made, it is on the regulatory side, a role that has increased substantially for the Corps since the 1972 Clean Water Act. That legislation authorized Corps oversight of dredging or dumping projects in the country’s wetlands.
“The impact statements on their own projects, like those of other agencies, tend to be propaganda pieces,” said Houck. “When it’s dealing with third party permits, the Corps is at its most honest and believable.”
Still, Houck said that while environmental concerns may be mitigated during a review process, the companies seeking permits almost always get the go-ahead.
“I’d say 99 percent,” confirmed Mark Sudol, the chief of the regulatory programs at Corps headquarters in Washington. It’s a figure that stirs ire from environmental groups which, Sudol said, fail to recognize environmental impacts that regulators have confronted in their reviews.
“When we’ve done our job, everyone is mad at us,” Sudol said. “We’ll work very hard to avoid negative impacts, so the developer doesn’t get the project he or she wants. On the other hand, the environmentalists aren’t happy because we issued the permit.”
Roughly 86,000 permits were issued in 2003 and Sudol expected that number to reach 90,000 this year.
While Sudol normally trusts his district regulators’ decision-making, he said he is “keeping an eye on” the Cape Wind review because it has generated talk about a need for national policy change – something project opponents like Gov. Mitt Romney (R) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D) have repeatedly advocated.
One area that Sudol and other Corps officials admit remains problematic is project oversight. Once projects are approved, Sudol admitted, the Corps lacks resources, both in funding and staffing, to monitor them – sometimes leading to problems like that at Emerald Isle. Sudol has requested an increase in his 2005 and 2006 budgets for more compliance work, calling it an area where the Corps’ can do better.
Beverly Getzen, the chief of the Corps’ office of environmental policy, agreed that the Corps must improve its monitoring work.
“I think the real nagging problem for all of us to face is how projects are ultimately managed, operated and maintained,” she said. “How do we make sure the projects are maintained 20 years from now?”
But Getzen, who has worked for the agency since 1972, argues that the Corps has become more eco-friendly. She remembers the first environmental impact statements as very different from those produced today, like the 4,000-page volume released for Cape Wind.
“Everyone was struggling with what to do and how to do it,” Getzen said. “People proudly provided 15-page documents accompanying their project plans.”
She also mentioned efforts to streamline data, citing recent agreements with the Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Geological Survey intended to support information-sharing about project successes and failures.
Even skeptics concede that the Corps has improved – somewhat.
“For the vast majority of their history, protecting the environment is not a part of their charge,” said Seth Kaplan, a senior attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation, which provisionally supports the Cape project-providing the rigorous environmental review comes out positively. “Congress told them to care about this stuff. Does it truly manifest itself in the way the Corps does business? The answer is sometimes.”
By no means, he said, is the overhaul complete.
“They’re not dancing around in Birkenstocks over there,” Kaplan said, who has often battled the Corps in the past. “The big picture is the military is like an aircraft carrier. Turning it is a really hard thing to do.”
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