ARCHIVES

• Senator Bond’s Anti-Environmental ‘Rider’ Attempts to Keep Halted Corps Project on Life Support
  On July 29, the Senate passed an Energy and Water spending bill which included anti-environmental riders inserted by Senator Bond (R-MO) that could breathe new life into a destructive project stopped by a Sept. 2007 Court Order. The project, called the St. John’s/New Madrid Floodway Project, would wall-off a quarter-mile gap in the Mississippi River levee system, which would prevent the River from reaching its floodplain, destroying 75,000 acres of rare backwater habitat critical to America’s fisheries, wildlife and local water quality, and put the towns of Cairo, IL, and Harlan and Paducah, KY, at greater risk of flooding.
  • Victory - On Oct. 28, 2009, Pres. Obama signed bill WITHOUT the Bond Rider
  • Fact Sheet: Remove Senator Bond’s Riders Final Bill (August 2009)
  • National Environmental Groups Urge Removal of Bond’s Riders (July 2009)
    
    
• American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009
  President Obama signed the stimulus bill into law on February 17, 2009. The bill will provide tens of billions of dollars for clean energy investments, conservation advances, and green jobs. The Corps of Engineers will receive $2 billion for construction, and the House language for the Inland Waterways Cost-Sharing Waiver was retained. Waiving the cost-sharing requirement could lead to more economically un-justified projects on the inland waterways system that damage the environment.
  • Inland Waterways Cost-sharing Waiver Fact Sheet
  • Jan. 15, 2009 letter from National Organizations calling on Congress to ensure that the stimulus legislation only funds responsible water projects
  • DO NOT FUND Project List sent to Congress by National Wildlife Federation and American Rivers
  • DO NOT FUND projects that CRN Memeber are working to stop
  • Sierra Club Fact Sheet on American Recovery & Reinvestment Act
  • Download Full House Bill Text (Title V, page 64, waives cost-sharing requirements for the barge industry. This House language on the cost-sharing waiver was included in the final bill. The more troublesome Senate language did not make it into the final bill.)
    
    
• Millions of Americans Urge Congress to Reform the Corps
  Read a July 6, 2007 letter from CRN Member Organizations and other groups urging Congress to pass corps reforms in the Water Resources Development Act of 2007.
  
  
• WRDA Bill 2007: Target for Corps Reforms
  Congress is planning to authorize more than $15 billion of new projects in the Water Resources and Development Act of 2007, and has the opportunity to also pass meaningful CORPS REFORMS in the bill to save taxpayer dollars and to protect our environment.
  
  
• Corps Reform Bill Introduced in Senate
  The Water Resources Planning and Modernization Act of 2007 (S. 564) was introduced by corps reform champions Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) on Feb. 13, 2007.