Lawmaker seeks to head off Army Corps job competition

A House Democrat is urging the Army Corps of Engineers not to put the jobs of 2,000 lock and dam operators up for competition with private firms.

The jobs should be designated as inherently governmental rather than commercial, because employees holding them make decisions that affect homeland security and the economy, wrote Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., in a message to colleagues. He encouraged House legislators to sign on to a letter asking Army Secretary Francis Harvey to reclassify the work.

Corps officials are in the final stages of researching whether it would be cost-effective to let contractors bid on the jobs, said George Halford, a spokesman. They plan to reach a decision this fall, he said.

The positions under consideration are clustered around more than 230 locks and dams on major waterways from the Ohio River to the Columbia River. "Decisions made by lock and dam personnel directly affect the safety and private property of U.S. citizens," Evans wrote in his Aug. 22 letter.

The federal operators monitor traffic on the waterways and maintain records of cargo traveling on the vessels. "If there's something funny or something doesn't gel, [we] have the authority to say 'Stop right there, you can't go through the lock,' " said Michael Arendt, an operator along the 234-mile Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.

Operators also perform minor repairs on the locks and dams and regulate water levels to protect citizens and property along waterways in the event of a hurricane or other natural disaster, Arendt said. "They consider us essential duty personnel," he added. "We stand post on critical infrastructure."

The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, completed two decades ago to help move cargo through western Alabama and northeastern Mississippi to the Tennessee River, could prove critical during a national emergency, Arendt said. If "something hit New Orleans . . . that waterway will be the only way to get goods and military equipment in and out of the Gulf Coast," he said.

In the event of a terrorist attack, contractors might not be allowed near the locks and dams, Arendt said. "During Sept. 11, we had to shut down the systems," he said. "This situation does not allow contractors into the compound."

"The bottom line is that we're looking at [outsourcing operation of] our critical infrastructure-locks and floodgates," said Arendt, a former riverboat captain who joined the Corps about five years ago and assists the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 561 in Mobile, Ala., on legislative issues.

Halford declined to discuss Evans' letter. He noted that the Corps is looking at a "wide range" of jobs classified as commercial to identify opportunities for public-private competitions. Roughly 7,500 positions that fall into this category will be analyzed over the next few years, he said.

The Corps has not completed a public-private competition since President Bush made competitive sourcing part of his management agenda, but is in the middle of one for about 1,500 information technology jobs at 55 locations across the country, Halford said. The agency moved up a notch on the competitive sourcing section of the Bush administration's quarterly management score card earlier this year, progressing from a red rating, indicating "unsatisfactory" performance, to yellow for "mixed results."

A competition for lock and dam operations makes little sense, said Matthew Biggs, legislative director for IFPTE, an AFL-CIO affiliate that represents about half of the federal employees with jobs at stake. The work is unlikely to generate much interest from the private sector, he argued.

"Why would they even consider contracting out these jobs?" Biggs asked. "The fact of the matter is that there's no company out there that does this work."