The National Wildlife Federation and Taxpayers for Common Sense are teaming up today to release a report that criticizes 25 Army Corps of Engineers projects as environmentally destructive and a waste of more than $6 billion. One of the projects blasted in the report is a billion-dollar expansion of barge locks on the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers; Corps officials have been accused in recent weeks of rigging a study to justify the project. The report also calls for scaling back navigation on a number of low-traffic rivers, including the Missouri, where recreation generates 12 times as many economic benefits as barging; the White, where a proposed channel project threatens two national wildlife refuges; and the Snake, where pressure is building to breach four dams to save salmon.
