Government
Army Corps Will Advance Designs Further Before Seeking Congress' OK to Build, Chief of Engineers Says
Lt. Gen. William Graham Jr., U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chief of engineers, told a US Senate panel that advancing designs further before seeking project authorization from Congress will reduce delays on civil projects.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is looking to update its procedures to improve quality, speed and cost, and as part of that effort Corps officials will no longer request authority to build a new project before reaching an approximately 35% design threshold, the Corps’ chief of engineers recently told senators.
While testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Sept. 17, Lt. Gen. William Graham Jr. said that any time a Corps civil works project is not delivered on schedule, he discusses what happened with the district engineer. The “vast majority” of causes are tied to not having enough information early on, when seeking authorization from Congress. That has often occurred when projects are still at a conceptual level, closer to 10% design, and with Corps officials lacking details from field investigations.
“First, we’ve got to get the engineering right,” Graham said. “The focus here is on the maturity of designs. We will not request authority to build new projects unless the design is advanced enough that we truly understand what we’re proposing to build.”
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) questioned whether the new policy could lead to a catch-22 in which large projects are unable to move forward because the Corps doesn’t have the resources to advance them to 35% design.
“I worry that this could lead to a situation where the Army Corps simply stops doing any more big projects,” Padilla said.
Graham said there could be exceptions, although delivering quality projects on schedule and within budget requires careful planning during design. He pointed to past criticism of the Corps, from decades ago, that it was only looking at scattered, small projects and not at system-wide issues. With direction from Congress, the agency began looking at larger flood prevention systems along coastal Texas and around New York City. Both programs have cost estimates running in the tens of billions of dollars.
“We have to figure out a way to break those down into manageable, implementable pieces so we can know what it is we’re proposing to build, and those also have to be budgetable,” Graham said.
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