Corps Finally Reveals $2.8 Million Flood Study

by Adam Lynch
August 20, 2009

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has finally released its 2007 Pearl River Watershed Feasibility Report to the public. The flood-prevention study has been long under wraps by the corps under the argument that it was in a "deliberative process."

Essentially, the study consists of the corps' comparison between a levees-only plan and a project devised by Jackson oilman John McGowan and Waggoner Engineering to flood the Pearl River between Hinds and Rankin counties and create two lakes. The Two Lakes plan has evolved under McGowan into its more recent incarnation proposing a 4,133-acre lake containing 36 islands ranging in size from 1.6 acres to 40 acres.

Douglas Kamien, chief of the Project Management Division of the Corps' Vicksburg District, said in an Aug. 11, 2009, letter to the Rankin-Hinds Pearl River Flood and Drainage Control District that "because the study has not been acted upon" by the Levee Board in more than two years, it has "lost the merits of protection sought by the deliberative process privilege." Kamien wrote that, under these circumstances, the Corps could do no foreseeable harm through releasing the study to the public.

The study, which cost $2.8 million, appeared on the Corps' web site this month. On Aug. 10, the Rankin-Hinds Pearl River Flood and Drainage Control District submitted a resolution requesting the Corps provide modifications of project schedules and costs of various flood-control propositions, including the McGowan plan. The board also requested the corps consider "all reasonable alternatives" to the McGowan plan and the Corps' own preferred levees-only plan.

On the same day, the board agreed to pull its selection of a locally preferred plan involving a smaller and less ambitious lake plan than the one featured in the corps' study, with board Chairman Billy Orr explaining that the Corps should move forward with its deliberations free of the local board's bias toward any particular plan.

The board also agreed to share the costs of upcoming modifications of the 2007 study with the Corps, not to exceed $50,000.

Levee Board attorney Trudy Allen would not release a copy of the board's resolution to the Jackson Free Press on the day of the board's decision, even though the board issued their decision in a public vote. The JFP instead received a copy of the resolution from Jackson Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr., who is a board member.

In its 2007 study, the Corps included every estimated cost requirement for the Two Lakes Project advocated by McGowan and Waggoner Engineering, including flood and environmental mitigation. Total costs amounted to a staggering $1.5 billion, much of which would have to be financed on a local level--likely derived through property taxes. Interest on the financing, as well as annual operation and maintenance, amounted to almost $9 million by corps' estimates.

McGowan, who criticized the Corps for not releasing the study, says the federal agency inflated costs, and says he can build a project containing two lakes for $336 million to $400 million. Engineer Robert Muller, who works with McGowan, told the JFP in May that the price fluctuates because the plan has yet to be submitted through the Environmental Protection Agency's vetting process--the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which considers all potential costs.

The report also makes clear that the Corps seriously considered a lake plan strictly at the behest of political forces, stating that former U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., pressed the issue of the local lake plan with then-Mississippi Economic Development Authority Director Leland Speed--a lake advocate--and representatives of the local Levee Board in 2006. The Corps report points out that even Pickering recognized at the time that the lakes plan, then referred to as the Lower Lakes Plan, "would probably not be justified economically" by the federal government, and that local funding would be needed to finance the brunt of the endeavor.

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