Secret lobbying effort to deregulate Federal levees

[Tanuki]

https://www.propublica.org/article/deregulate-federal-levees-section-408-permit-secretive-lobbying-effort?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=1522387327

"Nearly a year after record Midwestern floods killed at least five people and caused $1.7 billion in damage, a secretive lobbying effort funded by Illinois and Missouri drainage districts is underway to roll back flood regulations, documents show.

The effort targets the authority of the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the nation’s federal levees — large hills that are typically built or strengthened by the Corps and are subject to its rules, but are managed by local drainage districts. Any time a district wants to permanently raise the height of a levee for more protection, it has to seek approval from the Corps, which considers whether a request would be “injurious to the public interest” before issuing a Section 408 permit.

The process is intended to prevent “levee wars,” in which communities race to build ever-higher levees at the expense of their neighbors. Levees constrict rivers, narrowing them and blocking off the floodplains that allow the water to spread out. This bottleneck effect ensures that towns with lower levees are more likely to flood.

But since mid-2016, lobbyists and attorneys working for a group called the 408 Coalition have spent at least $230,000 in taxpayer money to weaken the Army Corps’ authority to limit levee heights and influence the agency’s funding, according to thousands of pages of coalition documents and correspondence obtained by the Telegraph of Alton, Illinois."......(more)