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An unincorporated division of the Anonymous Anything Society - October 23, 2013


THE McCONNELL BOONDOGGLE or The Kentucky Kickback

    Even when he is displeased, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader of the minority in the Senate, appears to be smiling.  Ever since the middle of this month of October, his smile has noticeably brightened - and for good reason.

    As House Speaker John Boehner floundered tearfully on, with the Tea Party hanging onto his coat-tails,  McConnell helped broker a deal between Republicans and Democrats that broke the shutdown logjam and accomplished three things with one masterful stroke, beginning with a jump-start of the government in all of it splendiferous glory.

    The move led by McConnell and Harry Reid of Nevada, broke the cap on the stratospheric national debt and allowed that can to be kicked down the road for a month or two, at no little cost to the electorate, we must add. The logroll, participated in by Charles Durbin of Illinois and longtime Senate Republican bigwig Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, allowed funds to flow to flooded Colorado and increased support to Veterans Affairs, among other needs.

    Yet in comparison to one major item that was stealthily hidden in the language of the emergency legislation, these were mere stipends. We are referring to the huge package of pork that was sneaked onto the bill at the last moment by McConnell. He and Senator Harry Reid boondoggled close to $3-billion dollars for a project that has, according to the great St Louis Post Dispatch newspaper, proven thus far to be a massive failure for the U.S. Corps of Engineers - though it has made millions for contractors and workers in Kentucky and Illinois since the project began in 1988. How this came to be added to an already overburdened budget is not a mystery. Under any circumstances, it is outrageous.

    We are awaiting the payback to Reid, who will soon find a few logs that will need rolling to benefit his Nevada constituents.

    We doubt that but a handful of those who read this or legislators who approved the bill that ended the government shutdown know much about the Olmsted Lock and Dam disaster. When begun in 1988, It was to have speeded-up barge and steamboat traffic on the Ohio river and was to have cost $177-millions in federal funding - an often-used veiled reference to your and my tax dollars. Officials just love to "fund" things. It's not as if they are spending real money.

     No, you read it correctly. This project has been going on for 25 years.  

    When I was a kid in a small Illinois town situated near the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, we often went a few miles downstate to the tiny riverside hamlet of Olmsted (population 221).  At that point, and at that time, the Ohio river produced some of the most spectacular catfish caught anywhere. While fishing, we could watch tugboats and barges full of produce - mostly coal, passing through the Olmsted locks, with us on the Illinois side and Kentucky on the other, some 17 miles upriver, east by northeast of Cairo, Illinois. This is at the extreme southern point of Illinois, where the Ohio spills into the Mississippi. 

    As I remember, it took four to six hours then for a boat pushing or pulling a string of barges to pass through the old locks. 25 years ago, new locks and a dam were designed by the Army Corps of Engineers for the Olmsted location that were supposed to cut the time for passage down to an hour or less. Had the Army Corps of Engineers followed normal protocol for constructing them, a new set of locks could have now been installed and in operation for at least 20 years, but the Corps wanted to try something different.

     Most dams and locks are built after a large diversion channel has been dug parallel to the river and a temporary dam, called a "coffer dam" built, thereby diverting the stream into the channel and leaving the original river bed relatively dry.

    In 1988 the Army Corps of Engineers decided against using that tried and tested procedure and instead attempted to forgo the coffer dam and diversion channel and do what was a termed, a "wet" installation.  They attempted to lower a contraption into the river and let divers do the initial support system underwater. After all, there had not been a major floor on the Ohio since 1937. Back then, it inundated much of Paducah, Kentucky and brought about the immersion of Shawneetown, the oldest inhabited town in Illinois. Some of that village, founded by Native Americans, was later built on higher ground, miles away from the riverbank. So, the U.S. AC of E should have known better; that the Ohio River is predictable.

    As to the Olmstead experiment, the Corps encountered one problem after another. The river was so muddy that divers could not see their own hands. The Ohio is a long river. Rains upstream so roiled the waters that the contraption failed time and time again. At one time, five divers nearly drowned at the Olmsted site. As time and tide rolled by year after year, costs kept mounting astronomically; far, far beyond the estimated original $177-milllion appropriation. The enormous contraption now lies beached. Yet the C of AE has not given up.

    As you can imagine, contractors have benefited enormously in the past 25 years of successive failures. Now, they and the voters of West Kentucky and Southern Illinois are about to benefit even more. I'm sure they must experience a great deal of gratitude for another $2.9-billion boondoggle to be hidden in the language of the crucial "jump-start our government" legislation. There is every reason to expect further over-runs.

     I must not fail to mention that the appropriation was in the Obama budget turned down by Congress earlier in the month.

    At the very least, the measure should have been delayed. The United State (sic) of America is drowning in debt, and to have opportunistic political "leaders," McConnell, Durbin, Feinstein (She heads a Senate subcommittee that overseas water projects) to have decided at a most inauspicious moment to tack on another multi-billion dollars amendment to the bipartisan bill, passed in order to get our malfunctioning government miss-firing again for a few more months, is outrageous. We ought to fire all of them.

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