Interagency team leads massive project in Houston

HOUSTON-After 30 years of planning, dredging specialists under the command of the Army Corps of Engineers have finally begun widening the Houston Ship Channel by 130 feet and deepening it by five. But the $500 million waterway expansion-which will make it possible for inland Houston to maintain its position as the biggest port for foreign trade in the United States-has already produced more than just an economic impact. The project has also produced a landmark environmental strategy that is shaking up the once-insular Army Corps of Engineers.

The Houston project-one of the largest dredging efforts in recent memory-attracted early complaints from environmental activists who contended that the disposal of dredged material at sea posed numerous ecological hazards. But after federal, state and local officials formed an unusual interagency coordination team (ICT), the parties managed to work out a solution that allowed the expansion to proceed as long as the dredged material was used to create additional habitat for aquatic life.

"The really strong positives are that collaborative policymaking really can work," said Linda Shead, executive director of the Galveston Bay Foundation, the lead group that helped push for an environmentally sensitive solution. The ICT, Shead said, "was a radical departure from most large federal projects. The notion was to get all the players on the coordination team, instead of having whoever holds the cards walk away doing what they want."

The Houston Ship Channel originated in 1837, when the steamship Laura traveled from Galveston Bay, on Texas' Gulf Coast, up Buffalo Bayou to Houston, mostly in waters less than six feet deep. With federal assistance, the channel was eventually widened to its current size of 40 feet deep and 400 feet wide. The Port of Houston Authority calculates that the port has an economic impact today of $5.5 billion and almost 200,000 jobs.

"The Ship Channel is really what has made Houston the city it is," said Tom Kornegay, the port authority's executive director. "We have the largest petrochemical complex in the U.S. on this channel, and Houston has been known for a long time as the oil capital of the U.S., if not the world." The port also handles large amounts of such commodities as fertilizers, iron and steel, organic chemicals, sugars, cereals and plastics.

But two factors-the rise in world shipping traffic and the continuing enlargement of ship sizes-eventually rendered the channel too small. Ships are increasingly being built to 45-foot standards. While such ships can enter the Houston channel, they can only be packed partially full so that they will be able to navigate 40-foot waters. Without a deeper and wider channel, advocates argue, Houston could lose out to ports with naturally deeper waters.

As early as 1968, the Port of Houston Authority realized the risks of not expanding its channel. At that time, it sought congressional approval for a deepening to 60 feet. In the late 1980s, Corps and Houston Port officials finally released an environmental impact statement for a scaled-down 50-foot channel. The document attracted a firestorm of criticism from environmentalists.

"The original plan submitted to us by the Corps and the Port would have covered about 11,000 acres of Galveston Bay four feet deep in dredge material from the channel," said Rusty Swafford, a fishery biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service and a delegate to the ICT.

Earlier expansions of the channel had caused ecological changes, too, but the current deepening and widening project was scheduled-for better or for worse-in an era when environmental laws and outside pressure had increased dramatically. Under pressure, the Port of Houston agreed to scale back its project further, this time from 50 feet to 45. But the plan's critics continued to attack it. Their complaints reached then-Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas, whose voice on such matters carried weight. Though Bentsen is best remembered for his pro-business attitude, he came out in favor of putting the ship channel project on hold until further environmental documentation was completed.

Bentsen's support-a big coup for environmental groups-led to the 1990 creation of the ICT. The panel included the Galveston district of the Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Natural Resource Conservation Service, the Galveston Bay National Estuary Program, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the Texas General Land Office, the Texas Water Development Board, the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission, the Port of Houston Authority and the City of Galveston.

This assemblage of partners was nothing like the Corps had ever seen before. Previously, a local sponsor would come to the Corps and propose a project. The Corps would then evaluate the proposal to see if it were in the national interest. If Corps officials concluded it was, they would write an environmental impact statement, seek final comments and then duke it out with other agencies that sought to derail it.

By contrast, the ICT process allowed other agencies with a stake in the issue to be involved in consensus-shaping at all stages, from planning to engineering to post-project monitoring. The Houston ICT oversaw experimental tests on such issues as the suspension and potential contamination from dredged sediments; the circulation of currents; the expected salinity levels in the bay; and the likelihood that organisms might be introduced to new habitats. It also included a "beneficial uses group," or BUG, which sought environmentally sound ways to recycle the dredged material.

Swafford of NMFS said the difference in procedures was "radical." Corps officials agree. "Having the team was a tremendous change when you compare it to the normal Corps process," said Dalton Krueger, an engineer who manages the project for the Corps' Galveston district. "Usually, the Corps is in control. But when you went to the ICT process, our control went to having one vote with the rest of the members. Getting to talk to each other when you were mad at each other was a challenge. But in the end, the process worked. It made for a better project overall."

The initial meetings, Swafford said, included a "high level" of mistrust. "It took time and commitment by individuals to agree that we were going to work on a project goal and leave all our agency baggage behind us," he said. "But eventually we became a problem-solving team rather than a team of agencies looking out for our respective slice of the pie. It took a couple of years to develop that trust."

By 1995, the ICT had arrived at an agreeable solution for most of the outstanding environmental concerns. Accomplishing that required some ingenuity-namely, agreeing to use the dredged material from the Ship Channel project to build 4,250 acres of new marshlands and a 12-acre bird island. The Corps also agreed to build an undersea berm that would serve as additional wildlife habitat.

Only some of those 4,250 acres will be built from the current project's dredges; the rest will be created from dredged material that is slated to collected during periodic maintenance of the channel over the next 50 years. (Contaminated sediments will be stored safely on land.) Indeed, over the full 50 years, the project will dredge 352 million cubic yards of muck from the bottom of Galveston Bay-enough to fill a 10 city-block area as high as Pikes Peak.

The first stage-the channel's widening and deepening-will take 5-6 years and cost about $580 million, not counting the cost of removing pipelines across the channel, which remains the subject of legal action. The approximately $580 million will include chunks appropriated from the federal coffers, though about a quarter of the total cost will be paid for by the Port of Houston and the Port of Galveston.

Environmental activist Shead said she's generally satisfied with the outcome. But Shead-who was not allowed to join the ICT until last year, communicating her views instead unofficially through NMFS and other formal representatives-says that the process did contain some imperfections. For one thing, she blames the Port of Houston for trying to ramrod the project through in the first place without a good enough environmental plan. "I believe they're listening to us now," she says, "but it's unfortunate they didn't do it sooner. You need to start at the beginning."

In addition, she says, the ICT didn't meet for more than two years after it agreed upon the consensus environmental plan. During those two years, the project was handed to Corps engineering specialists-officials who had not been involved in the ICT and bore no personal loyalty to it. "Things that didn't need to be issues became issues," she says. "You need to start the process early and carry through the collaborative process."

For their part, port officials continue to chafe at the lengthy administrative delays caused by environmental challenges and the slow administrative system that answers to them. Eileen Denne, whose group, the American Association of Port Authorities, gave the Houston ICT an award for community and public involvement in 1995, nonetheless complains that "the whole process of dredging harbors today takes much longer than you can imagine. Feasibility studies, economic impact studies, the quest for federal funding, getting the local share of the cost, deciding how to dispose of sediments-it all can take up to 30 years. At one point we counted up to 33 local, state and federal agencies that can have a say."

Denne says that some administrative moves were made in the mid-1990s to streamline that process, particularly by improving communication and coordination between the relevant agencies. But participants say that the most important advance may be the ICT approach.

For instance, Port of Houston executive Kornegay says the ICT removed environmental opposition from the project, thus enabling the Port and its allies to go to Congress with a unified voice. "It wasn't easy to make the case, but what helped is the fact that we didn't have environmentalists going to Congress saying it was a bad thing," he says. "Actually, they wound up saying it was a good thing."

So far, the ICT approach has been used on several other projects along Texas' Gulf coast, and Corps officials have gotten queries about it from government officials as far away as Portland, Ore. "To me," says Swafford of NMFS, "the key is identifying a multidisciplinary team willing to work to solve a problem. Group dynamics being what they are, you don't necessarily all have to like each other. But it's probably better if you don't all hate each other."