NEWS RELEASE

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy / Izaak Walton League of America

Mississippi River Basin Alliance / Mississippi River Revival

National Audubon Society / National Wildlife Federation

Sierra Club / Taxpayers for Common Sense

FOR RELEASE MONDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2000

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONSERVATIONISTS CALL FOR INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF CORPS OF ENGINEERS' MISSISSIPPI RIVER STUDY; URGE INVESTIGATION OF TOP CORPS OFFICIALS

WASHINGTON, D.C, Feb. 14 -- A coalition of citizen organizations said Monday that there is compelling evidence that the Army Corps of Engineers deliberately distorted data in a seven-year study to try to justify a billion-dollar, taxpayer-subsidized project to boost barge traffic on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers.

The six conservation groups and two nonprofit research organizations called for a full and public investigation of the matter, which came to light Sunday in reports by four major newspapers. The investigation, the groups said, should be conducted by an impartial body outside of the Defense Department, which they stressed cannot be trusted to investigate one of its own agencies.

They also called for the appointment of an independent legal investigator to determine whether top officers of the Corps of Engineers violated federal law by manipulating the study, and whether they should be disciplined. Further, the groups urged that the federal employees who revealed the data distortions -- the "whistle blowers" within the Corps -- be protected from any reprisals by their superiors.

"The internal memoranda, e-mails and other documents that have come to light suggest a possibly broad conspiracy within the Corps to falsely justify what would be a costly and environmentally damaging construction project," said David Conrad of the National Wildlife Federation.

"If true, this kind of manipulation could amount to a basic fraud on taxpayers, and an assault on the environment for the benefit of the barge industry, which already receives a 90-percent taxpayer subsidy," said Conrad, a water resources specialist.

(more)

Page 2

Using taxpayer monies, the Corps pays more than 90 percent -- $700 million to $800 million a year -- of the cost of operating, maintaining and rehabilitating the inland waterway system. That includes the 37 navigation locks and adjacent dams that span the Upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers.

Initially, economists involved in the navigation study -- the biggest such study ever by the Corps -- concluded that spending more than $1 billion to expand some locks to speed barge traffic could not be economically justified. However, that conclusion was shoved aside when top Corps officers directed subordinates to develop new, bogus figures to "prove" that the benefits of lock expansion exceeded the cost.

That mischief is revealed in internal Corps documents obtained by newspaper reporters and in a sworn affidavit filed Feb. 2 by Donald Sweeney. He is a 22-year Corps employee with a doctoral degree in economics, and for five years headed the team working on the crucial economic component of the study. Corps officials unhappy with the team's findings replaced Sweeney as the study's top economist, but he remains employed at the agency's St. Louis District headquarters. His 44-page affidavit was filed with federal investigators under a whistle-blower law.

Sweeney's position that the Corps' top officers are uninterested in unbiased economic analyses of barge traffic has been corroborated by Jeffrey Marmorstein, a Corps research analyst who worked on the economic study before and after it was headed by Sweeney.

The citizen groups' call for action followed reports about the Corps' manipulations that appeared in the Des Moines Register, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and the Washington Post.

"These revelations throw a pall of doubt over the entire study, not just the Corps' economic findings; its engineering and environmental analyses are also suspect," said Richard X. Moore, Upper Mississippi River regional coordinator for the Izaak Walton League. "The Corps has squandered more than $55 million in taxpayers' money on a pile of worthless paper."

(more)

Page 3

Carl Zichella, Midwest staff director of the Sierra Club, put it this way:

"We never assumed that we could trust the Corps of Engineers and this proves it. Don Sweeney deserves the support and thanks of all Americans who want to protect the nation's greatest river system and who don't want to see it killed by more taxpayer subsidies to wealthy barge companies."

"Dr. Sweeney should be applauded for his courageous actions," said Steve Ellis, director of water resources for Taxpayers for Common Sense. "Unfortunately, we must now watch the Corps of Engineers to ensure that it does not punish Dr. Sweeney for his principled stand on behalf of federal taxpayers."

"It's clearly time to restore the Upper Mississippi and the Illinois rivers, not rebuild the existing locks or build new locks. This project would not help Midwest farmers nor the rivers," said Dan McGuiness, director of the Upper Mississippi River Campaign for the National Audubon Society.

The barge industry, which is dominated by such agri-business giants as Cargill Inc., ConAgra Corp. and Archer Daniels Midland Co., wants expanded locks and other costly navigation features to move barges faster and give them bigger profits.

But that could mean a doubling of barge traffic, and that alarms conservationists. They note that numerous studies by non-Corps biologists have shown that the Upper Mississippi and the Illinois already have declined because of the lock and dams, which were built in the 1930s and 1940s. They keep the water at an unnaturally high level to allow barge traffic, and this has severely disrupted the natural rise and fall of the rivers' water -- a phenomenon that allows aquatic life to flourish.

Also, barge traffic creates waves that push silt into fertile backwaters and wetlands along the two rivers, harming fish spawning areas and aquatic plants that provide food for waterfowl and other wildlife. In addition to such serious environmental impacts, the Corps' proposal fails to make economic sense -- as was shown by Sweeney's original, undistorted analysis.

(more)

Page 4

Mark Muller, an environmental engineer with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, said the revelations about the Corps' study "confirms our suspicion that the navigation project was not going forward to benefit Midwest family farmers, but as a favor to special interests."

Tim Sullivan, executive director of the Mississippi River Basin Alliance, said, "The barge industry and big agribusinesses contend that this expensive boondoggle would help Midwest farmers by increasing slightly the price paid for corn and soybeans that are barged down the Mississippi to foreign markets.

"However, the only real winners would be a handful of international grain shippers and barge owners," he said. "The profits they would receive from an increase in this corporate subsidy won't trickle down to farmers and rural communities. Spending more than $1 billion in federal funds in the hope that a few pennies per bushel would return to farmers is an outrage."

For further information, contact:

-- END --