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Coburn takes heat for blocking hurricane-protection bill

Tulsa World

December 16, 2006

Sen. Tom Coburn has come under fire for blocking legislation that would have reauthorized payment for hurricane protection along the Gulf of Mexico .

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., sent Coburn a letter this week expressing disappointment that he placed a hold on a bill that would renew congressional authority for the projects.

Landrieu said she would push for the measure when the new Congress convenes in January.

"I admire your tenacity to eliminate unnecessary, unwarranted and unwise government spending," Lan drieu wrote Coburn, R-Okla. "However, this project does not fall in any of the above categories."

The House approved legislation late last week that would reauthorize paying for levees along the Gulf of Mexico and a lock complex in the Houma Navigation Canal . The work had been authorized in 2000, Lan drieu said, but the approval expired before the Army Corps of Engineers finished the job.

Renewal had been included in a broad water project bill that wasn't going to pass before Congress adjourned, so Louisiana lawmakers put the projects in a new bill and tried to get it approved in the waning hours of the 2006 session.

Coburn refused to release his "hold" on the bill.

Under Senate procedures, a single senator can stop a bill from consideration.

In a prepared statement, Landrieu said she and staff members from the Environment and Public Works Committee pushed until 4:30 a.m. last Saturday for an agreement that would move the project through the Senate.

Despite phone calls from Sen. Landrieu and other colleagues, Coburn refused to release his hold on the bill.

"This flood control system would provide a series of levees, locks and other systems that would protect the 120,000 people who live in the 1,700 square miles from storm surges from hurricanes in the Gulf," Landrieu said her letter.

Coburn spokesman John Hart said the new bill included work that hadn't been previously authorized and that Coburn couldn't get cost estimates for it. He also said estimates were wide-ranging.

"In last-minute discussions, we were given costs estimates on the bill ranging from $240 million to $450 million and later $841 million," Hart said. "The first estimates came from her staff and an expert lobbyist. More estimates came from a corps study -- the same agency that will be administering the project and that has been known to have shoddy accounting practices."

Hart said Landrieu could not provide a Congressional Budget Office (estimate) or any other reliable and objective source.

Landrieu disputed Hart's statements in a Friday press release.

"The project has been thoroughly vetted through all the same procedural channels as other fully funded Army Corps of Engineers projects nationwide, including any in Oklahoma ," Landrieu's statement says. "The Corps completed its favorable feasibility study and cost-benefit analysis more than five years ago, and continues to update its cost estimates on a Web site -- http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/prj/mtog/."

Hart said that if the projects were a priority to Landrieu she should have worked harder on it and spent less time on pork-barrel projects.

"If this project was such an urgent priority for Senator Landrieu, why did she and her staff spend countless hours pushing through earmarks for things like blackbird control and a study of infectious diseases on alligator farms?" Hart asked. "Members of Congress were elected to make tough choices between competing priorities. We'll leave it to taxpayers in Louisiana and elsewhere to check the facts on Senator Landrieu's own Web site, which boasts about her work in securing pork, and decide if she has prioritized wisely."

"We also prefer to check our facts with CBO. Unfortunately, Senator Landrieu outsourced her fact-checking to lobbyists at 4 a.m. in the waning hours of the session."

Hart added that Landrieu was an ally for Coburn on his other efforts to fight federal spending projects, thanking her for supporting a Coburn amendment that would have shifted $452 million from a controversial bridges project in Alaska -- the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" -- to reconstruction of New Orleans .