The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will take its first step toward following through on a promise to return to a regular schedule of water resources authorizations.
A Friday roundtable in New Orleans will serve as the first official discussion of a new Water Resources Development Act (WRDA). WRDA bills where once an every-other-year process for authorizing flood control, lock, dam, levee, ecosystem restoration, and water resources projects sponsored by the Army Corps of Engineers (Corps). However, in recent times the legislation has gone several years before a new WRDA measure is enacted.
The roundtable discussion is likely to examine the successes and failures of the 2014 WRRDA measure, which aimed to reduce the backlog of projects and overhaul the Corps' red-tape-laden processes. One key issue still shaking out is a provision (Section 7001) aimed at reconfiguring how new projects get authorized in a way that would give Congress more of a say in the process without running afoul of the earmark ban. WRDA set up a process by which the Corps collects project ideas from local communities and forwards them to Congress in an annual report, which allows lawmakers to then authorize individual projects included in the report without them being considered earmarks. However, in the first report delivered earlier this year, the agency applied its own criteria to which projects made the list, angering lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.