Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) will take to Congress the barge industry's ongoing fight with the Obama administration to ensure the federal government keeps picking up the lion's share of the tab for construction and maintenance of the nation's locks and dams.

The bill, now in discussion draft form and expected to be introduced by Whitfield next week, would implement an industry-authored capital investment plan.

While the plan would raise fuel taxes on shippers from 20 to 26 cents per gallon, it would shift some costs now split by the federal government and industry entirely to the feds, among other changes designed to jump-start work.

Nonpartisan taxpayer watchdog groups say that amounts to preserving or potentially increasing a 90 percent federal subsidy of the barge industry. But industry contends that the change is only fair, since it now shares the burden of horrendous project cost overruns resulting from federal mismanagement of projects.

Case in point: the Ohio River Olmstead Locks and Dam project, which is in Whitfield's district. The project, expected to cost $775 million when it began in 1988, was recently estimated to cost $3.1 billion and stretch on for another decade or more.

Whitfield has called the project a "complete failure."

The Obama administration has floated a competing lock-and-dam maintenance plan that would raise taxes on shippers so as to generate $1 billion over the next decade for waterway maintenance. The two sides have failed to come together on a compromise (Greenwire, Oct. 3).

Instead, with Whitfield's help, the industry is taking its pitch to Congress.

Asked about criticism of the industry plan from spending watchdogs, Whitfield yesterday said, "It does cause the government to have to put up more money because there's more money that they're [the industry] putting up," referring to the barge industry's proposal that fuel taxes increase. "So the only thing I can say to answer the criticism is that the infrastructure needs are so dire that it's really beginning to interfere with the inland waterway traffic."

Nearly 60 percent of these river traffic structures, essential to moving freight through the nation's interior waterways, have surpassed their useful life, creating an urgent backlog of $8 billion in construction and repair needs, according to the industry.

Contributing to the system's disrepair and the depletion of the maintenance trust fund are a wasteful, decadelong congressional earmark-driven spending spree, inefficiencies of the federal appropriations process, and mismanagement and cutbacks at the Army Corps of Engineers.

The feds covered nearly the entire cost of harbor and inland waterway infrastructure until 1986, when cost-shares were passed.

Given the neglect and age of many locks and dams, industry officials say major failures could be imminent.

"It's absolutely incredible that we have not had catastrophic, unplanned failure yet," said Mike Toohey, president and CEO of the Waterways Council Inc., the industry's lobbying arm.

With the trust fund now depleted, congressional appropriations for inland waterways hovering around $160 million annually, and the Olmstead project consuming so much of the available cash, the situation shows little sign of improving.

"You do the math," he said. "It's going to take 12 to 14 years to finish this project, and what that means is that no other projects are going to receive meaningful funding needed to complete them in the next 12 years."

Whitfield is expected to be joined by co-sponsors Jerry Costello (D-Ill.), Tim Johnson (R-Ill.), Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.) and Jimmy Duncan (R-Tenn.), according to industry officials.

Click here to read a section-by-section analysis of the draft bill.