Senators push to increase funds for dredging
Annie Snider, E&E reporter (EE Daily), Published: Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Ports proponents in the Senate are leaning on appropriators to follow through with funding for harbor maintenance and the inland waterways system as work on 2016 funding measures moves forward.
In a bipartisan letter sent to Appropriations Committee cardinals last week, 19 senators asked their colleagues to hit the funding targets set in last year’s Water Resources Reform and Development Act for spending on dredging.
More than $1.8 billion flows into the Harbor Maintenance Fund each year, thanks to an ad valorem tax on goods passing through U.S. docks, but far less than that gets appropriated each year for dredging. That has left shipping channels and harbors silted in and less efficient.
The WRRDA bill laid out a path to increase the fund’s usage, reaching full expenditure in 2025. That pathway was the result of negotiations between authorizers and appropriators at the time, but whether appropriators will follow through remains to be seen.
The fiscal 2015 spending bill fell short of the WRRDA targets, and the House’s fiscal 2016 energy and water spending bill being marked up by the Appropriations Committee this morning falls $72 million shy of the next target.
“Harbors and navigation channels are a vital part of our nation’s transportation infrastructure, and the elimination for reduction in their capacity can have significant impacts on local communities and economies as well as the national economy,” Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and 18 colleagues wrote in the letter.
They also argued for full usage of the now beefed-up Inland Waterways Trust Fund. That fund is fed by a 29-cent-per-gallon tax on barge diesel fuel, and splits the price for new construction projects and major rehabilitations of locks and dams.
Due to a fuel tax increase passed by Congress last year and a move to shift more of the cost of the system’s priciest project onto the federal dime, the trust fund now has more money to work with. Industry advocates are pushing to make sure it all gets used.
Tags: dredging, policy