Illinois Rivers Project Could Get New Life With Trump Infrastructure Push

Often overlooked in an age of air travel and superhighways, infrastructure on the Midwest's major rivers may be poised for an upgrade.

Seven locks and dams on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, which allow barges carrying 22 million tons of commodities each year to travel between St. Louis, Chicago and the Twin Cities in Minnesota, are included on a list of projects under consideration by President Donald Trump's administration.

Trump targeted the nation's infrastructure during his election night victory speech, saying he aims to make it "second to none." In response, representatives from Illinois and four other states in the Upper Midwest are working to make sure the river projects, and the ecological restoration efforts tied to them, become a priority.

State and federal officials, along with environmental groups and the shipping industry, hope a renewed push from Midwestern voices will mean the aging heartland infrastructure is included if the Trump administration announces a nationwide construction plan.

"We need to make sure that we're prepared for [it] if circumstances align; it has a chance to get implemented," said Dru Buntin, executive director of the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, a group formed by regional governors to coordinate river-related policies and work with federal agencies.

After the election, the Trump transition team reached out to the National Governors Association for infrastructure priority projects, Buntin said, and state leaders pitched the rivers project. It is now included in a priority list circulating in Washington.

The wide-reaching plan, dubbed the Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program, was approved by Congress in 2007 and envisions new, longer locks on the rivers and environmental work, including restoration of wetlands, forests, side channels and backwaters, shoreline protections and fish passages.

The proposal, which a decade ago had an estimated price tag of $4.2 billion, targets five Mississippi River locks on the western edge of Illinois, from near Quincy to northwest of Alton, and two on the Illinois River — one near Peoria and the other near Beardstown.

With no appropriation from Congress, however, the plan has been on the shelf.

Whether the pitch from the Midwest strikes a chord with the new administration remains to be seen.

"If Congress and the administration say, 'We want you to go to full-scale implementation,' we could ramp up and find the resources to move forward," Michael Tarpey, the Army Corps of Engineers' regional program manager for the project, said at a recent river basin association meeting.

While the rivers plan has the backing of many environmental groups, including the Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited and Audubon Society, there are plenty of skeptics who argue that new locks are unnecessary and not worth the public investment.

"Whenever you compromise between the environment and industry that requires infrastructure, like a lock-and-dam system, it's always the environment that's going to lose," said Olivia Dorothy, associate director of Mississippi River management at American Rivers, an advocacy group.

Marine Highway

The locks and dams on 1,200 miles of the Upper Mississippi, from Cairo, Illinois, to St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Illinois River, from near Alton, Illinois to Chicago, allow boats and barges to climb or descend through a network of steps so they can travel the length of the inland waterway system.

The rivers link the Great Lakes and the cities and farms of the Upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, serving as a freight pathway for corn, soybeans, steel products, coal, chemicals, machinery, oil, petroleum products, concrete and cement.

Operated and maintained by the Army Corps, the lock system raises and lowers the water level of the river inside a walled-off chamber, allowing towboats and barges to travel around the dams. The sets of locks and dams were built mostly in the late 1930s to make the rivers passable for boats, creating deeper pools of water behind the dams.

Upgrades and overhauls on the locks have been discussed for decades. The locks also are unable to handle the size of modern barge configurations, which include 15 barges. Each of the locks under consideration for improvements is 600 feet long. New locks would double the size.

Under the current configuration, towboats must break apart their barges in order to move up or down the river through each lock, a cumbersome and complicated process that can take more than three hours at each location, barge owners and the Army Corps said. Plus, the aging locks are prone to breakdown. In fiscal year 2016, the Army Corps allocated $1.6 million for emergency lock repairs in the St. Louis district.

The amount of goods shipped on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois peaked in the 1980s, according to the Army Corps, but it has held steady in recent years.

"The importance of the locks can't really be overlooked from an agricultural production standpoint," said Dan Mecklenborg, chief legal officer and secretary at Ingram Barge Co., and board member on the Waterways Council, a national advocacy group. "Barge transportation is really how farmers get their corn and soybeans into the market."

Ingram operates 5,000 barges and 140 towboats on the nation's inland waterways, including the stretches of rivers under consideration for upgrades. New locks, Mecklenborg said, would allow his company to handle larger loads at a relatively low cost, speed up river trips and avoid thousands of hours of delays.

The aging locks regularly break down, leading to costly delays and inefficient travel, shipping industry leaders say. A closed lock can stack up river traffic for days, costing tens of thousands of dollars each day, Mecklenborg said. And a malfunctioning lock, the Army Corps said, can send crews scrambling to find ancient replacement parts.

The American Society of Civil Engineers in 2013 gave the country's inland waterway infrastructure a D-minus, stating that aging locks and dredge channels slow commerce. Bill Stahlman, who is on the committee that issues grades, said the locks and dams are in need of an overhaul.

"It's kind of like having a car with 300,000 miles on it, and you think you can keep driving it — but at some point you're going to have to get a new one," Stahlman said.

Incremental or small upgrades to the locks do not solve the problem that they all need to be replaced, he said.

"Each year that passes, you're just exacerbating the problem," said Stahlman, the director of engineering and construction at America's Central Port in Granite City, Illinois.

Shipping industry leaders say a 15-barge tow is the equivalent of 1,050 semi-trailer loads or 200-plus rail cars. One loaded barge can carry 58,000 bushels of wheat or 27,500 barrels of gasoline, according to the National Waterways Foundation. The shipping industry says shipping goods by water reduces congestion on highways and is more fuel efficient than trucks or trains.

Proponents of the locks plan also argue the construction will create jobs, not only during the building of the new chambers but at the rivers' terminals and ports, and throughout the Midwestern agricultural community.

While negotiations about Midwestern locks and dams were contentious during the 1980s, Mecklenborg said, the rivers plan approved in 2007 "was a cooperative agreement that balanced the navigational and ecosystem restoration aspects, and was essential to getting the bipartisan support we received."

"That's why," he said, "we're hopeful we can get this re-energized and moving forward."

Locks vs. Habitat

The construction aspects of the rivers proposal, however, are only half of the plan that was hammered out over years of talks between the Army Corps, governments and advocacy groups.

The presence of the dams, environmentalists say, changes the dynamic of the river and the surrounding habitat, creating a need for funding to help the wetlands, shorelines, back channels, islands and animals that depend on the flowing water and the surrounding land.

The more stagnant, slowly flowing water above the dams creates problems for the water and the array of aquatic life that depends on the river. Stagnant water is not good for mussels, fish and insects, environmentalists say, and the dredging that is needed to maintain the channel changes the flow and path of the water. Natives species of fish are limited in movement, and levees and channel barriers cut off the river from the flood plain.

The environmental pieces of the plan include work to build islands, improve shorelines and rehabilitate those flood plains.

But with Trump's focus on infrastructure and skepticism of environmental issues, there is concern construction may receive a green light while habitat, which essentially is to receive a dollar-for-dollar investment with construction, is sliced away.

The priority list making the rounds in Washington makes no mention of the ecological component, or its cost.

Gretchen Benjamin, associate director of water infrastructure at the Nature Conservancy, who also spoke at the river basin association meeting, said "it was a little bit alarming" to see the priority list that has been circulating include only the infrastructure portions of the navigation and ecosystem rivers plan, with no mention of the environmental aspects.

"Should the program go forward, it is essential that it have a dual purpose — that both infrastructure and the environment are funded," she said. "A lot of time and a lot of smart people sat down and thought about how this should work."

Benjamin said the ecological restoration would cost $12 million for planning and design in the first year, $68 million as construction began the following year and upward of $100 million in the years beyond. As it stands now, she said, about 3% of "good viable" river habitat is being lost each year.

Environmental groups also stress that restoration work, such as building a new lock, would also mean "shovel-ready" construction jobs.

Even so, some groups remain opposed to the entire lock-and-dams initiative and to tying habitat and river restoration to infrastructure projects.

Dorothy, of American Rivers, said that by even the most optimistic scenario, commerce and traffic on the river does not justify investment of federal money in locks and dams.

"It causes a lot of environmental damage, and it's not very economical," Dorothy said. "So does it make sense to expand the system, or does it make sense to evaluate the system as a whole?"

American Rivers said the more prudent solution for the Mississippi and Illinois river locks and dams is smaller, less expensive construction and improvements, such as added guide boats, new guide walls and a traffic scheduling system to coordinate river traffic and cut down on delays and backups.

"The fact is the navigation system is what causes the need for restoration," said Brad Walker, rivers director at the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. "If [the plan] increases navigation, it could potentially create more harm. There is no reason to put these two elements together. I keep hoping sanity will start to reign. The whole idea is to provide a public benefit, and you have a project that doesn't do that."

Hopeful About Funding

It is unclear whether a project focused on river commerce and environmental issues away from the country's coasts will get any attention at all.

The groups and government leaders who met in February at the river basin association's annual meeting in the Quad Cities of Iowa, wanted to make sure they are prepared if leaders in Washington push forward with an infrastructure bill.

The group, which includes representatives from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, as well as state, federal and environmental agencies, emphasized the importance of the rivers project in a Jan. 11 letter to now-Vice President Mike Pence.

The president's team, Buntin of the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association said, wants projects that are ready to begin within a year and have at least 30% of their designs complete. It may take some creativity, but some aspects of the rivers projects fit that description, including less dramatic elements such as extra boats to aid barges through the locks to improve efficiency and new walls along the river shoreline where boats can be moored.

Buntin said that designs for 1,200-foot chambers on two locks on the Mississippi are about halfway done, and the lock near Beardstown, Illinois, is 30% designed.

Even if new locks get the green light, it may take years before they are fully operational. The Army Corps estimates it may take 15 to 20 years of funding to realize all aspects of the plan.

But U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, a Republican from Taylorville, Illinois, whose district spans from Bloomington to the Mississippi River, where two of the locks are located, is hopeful the Trump administration is serious about investing in river infrastructure.

"To have an administration put a focus on the Upper Mississippi River and the Illinois waterways is just a continuous breath of fresh air," Davis said. To have the rivers project included in national conversations about priority infrastructure projects, he said, "is a very good sign for us."

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth this week met with several members of the Army Corps to discuss the need to invest in the lock-and-dam systems, stressing the importance of speeding up barge traffic to help the state's agriculture industry and transportation network.

Davis, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said members have discussed the benefits of the Midwest rivers in terms of agriculture, commerce and business. He also supports the ecosystem restoration portion of the plan.

"There's no Republican and Democrat lock and dam projects," Davis said, "it's all America's projects."