Before you present your testimony, the Chair notes the presence of Congressman Tenzer, one of the authors of these bills, and would like to invite him to sit on the rostrum with the committee members.

STATEMENT OF ALFRED B. FITT, SPECIAL ASSISTANT FOR CIVIL FUNCTIONS, U.S. CORPS OF ENGINEERS

Mr. FITT. Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, General Woodbury will not be here today. I am Alfred B. Fitt, General Counsel for the Department of the Army and also Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army for Civil Functions.

The Secretary of the Army has submitted to the committee a report on H.R. 25 and H.R. 4505, dated March 1, 1967. My remarks at this juncture will be confined to those bills.

The position of the Department of the Army on the bills, H.R. 25 and H.R. 4505, may be summarized as follows:

First, we are in full accord with the main objective of these bills; that is, the objective of preserving estuaries of particular natural beauty or which are especially suitable for recreational use or the enhancement and conservation of fish and wildlife resources.

Second, we believe that the best way to achieve this objective would be through a program of several stages, the first of which should be the development of reports proposing specific authorization by the Congress of individual national estuarine areas.

In authorizing these areas, on a case-by-case basis, the Congress can provide all of the authorities needed to acquire lands and manage the area. This is the way in which national seashores have been authorized by the Congress, and our own experience with the case-by-case congressional approach to civil works authorizations convinces us that this system has much to commend it. If this approach is selected, it will be unnecessary for the Congress to provide at this time all of the general authorities contemplated by H.R. 25 and H.R. 4505.

Third, it is our view that, more study is required before deciding whether the single-permit system now administered by the Department of the Army should be abandoned. Consequently, we recommend the deletion of section 12 of H.R. 25 and H.R. 4505.

Fourth, even if section 12 in its entirety is not deleted, its reference to the waters of the Great Lakes should be deleted. The Great Lakes and their connecting channels do have problems, but they differ greatly from the esthetic, recreational and fish and wildlife problems with which the bills before the committee were designed to deal. We do not believe that useful solutions to the problems of the Great Lakes would follow from their mere mention in legislation aimed at the quite different problems arising at our ocean shores and bays.

Fifth, the Department of the Army suggests that the terms "national estuarine area" and "estuary" be more clearly defined in the proposed legislation.

Finally, our report points out the need for making it clear that the estuary legislation is not intended to give the Secretary of the Interior control over Federal projects which the Congress has, by law, placed under the jurisdiction of other agencies of the Federal Government. Obviously, while cooperation and consultation among different Fed

eral agencies is desirable, responsibility for such projects cannot be divided.

My main purpose in appearing here today is to urge the committee to give careful consideration to the views expressed in the Secretary of the Army's reports upon these bills.

I especially urge that the Congress use great caution in dealing with the section 12 proposal that the Nation establish a multiple permit system for determining what structures shall be placed in, or what dredging shall be done in, some of the navigable waters of the United States.

It is our view that if changes in the permit system are to be made, they probably should apply not only with respect to permits for work in estuaries and in the Great Lakes, but to all the navigable waters of the United States. Furthermore, at this juncture it is not at all clear that any legislation on the point is needed.

The problems in administering the present permit system, such as they are, may very well yield to administrative action within the executive branch. This is a subject which is even now under discussion between the Department of the Army and other Federal agencies, including the Department of the Interior. Until such time as those discussions result in an administration legislative proposal, we urge that the Congress defer its consideration of the permit system.

There is one other technical point to which I wish to call your attention. Section 8 of the bill prescribes that Army shore erosion control, dredging, filling, or beach protection activity in national estuarine areas shall be conducted "in accordance with a plan that is mutually acceptable to the" Secretaries of the Interior and of the Army.

The desirability of this approach seems almost too obvious to need stating in legislation. However, if it should be enacted and in the unlikely event that the Secretaries could not agree in a given case, it should be understood that the President's power to settle differences within the executive branch was not intended to be impaired by this

bill.

I should like to close my statement by expressing the hope that the Congress will take effective action to make possible the selection and preservation of those estuaries which can make their maximum contribution to the national welfare if used for recreation, the enjoyment of scenic beauty, and the enhancement of the fish and wildlife resources. This objective can, I believe, be attained by enabling the Secretary of the Interior to prepare and submit to Congress reports proposing specific authorization of national estuarine areas, as well as specific authorization of any other measures his studies show to be necessary to achieve the principal objective of the bills now before the committee. I thank the committee for this opportunity to present the views of the Department of the Army on these important legislative proposals. Mr. Chairman, that concludes my statement.

Mr. DINGELL. Thank you very much, Mr. Fitt. The Chair will note that we have been friends for quite a while. Mr. Fitt also comes from the State of Michigan and has a distinguished record, both in the government of the State of Michigan and also in the Federal Gov

ernment.

Because of my personal friendship with Mr. Fitt, I am particularly pleased to see him here this morning.

Mr. FITT. It is a pleasure to be here, sir.

Mr. DINGELL. Mr. Morton?

Mr. MORTON. I certainly want to welcome you today, Mr. Fitt. I do a lot of business with the Corps of Engineers.

Do you have any thoughts on how this could be done without a dual permit system?

Mr. FITT. Of course, these are the kinds of problems which are under discussion, primarily with the Department of the Interior obviously. I am not sure that the problems of the past are the same as those of today in this situation. There is a good deal of coordination and consultation by the corps with the Department of the Interior.

In any instance where an applicant has requested permission to dredge or for that matter to place a structure in navigable waters, a notice of the application is given to several bureaus in the Department of the Interior and, where objections are stated by those bureaus, there is an attempt to secure the modification of the proposed work. In some instances the work simply is absolutely incompatible with the position, for example, of the Fish and Wildlife Service; in the vast majority of the cases, the problem is worked out or the permit is denied, but in a few cases the permit is issued over fish and wildlife objections. I met with Dr. Cain yesterday and we talked about this. Our statistics have not been accumulated in the fashion that I think we will use in the future, but I asked him how many cases arose last year in which a State or the local authorities had given their consent to a particular permit and the Fish and Wildlife Service objected and the permit had nevertheless been granted.

He thought that there were two cases last year and this would be out of about 1,700 dredging permits, and you have a total of perhaps 7,000 permit applications. Not all of them are brought to fruition, of course, but I think it illustrates that we have already come a long way toward achieving a joint Federal position on these cases and we have reduced the conflicts to just about the absolute minimum, I would

say.

Mr. MORTON. I certainly hope that this is true, but let's just take a specific project and review what actually happened. Let's take the project of widening the C. & D. Canal.

This was authorized through authorization legislation that went through the Public Works Committee of the House and the other body and subsequently was funded by the Appropriations Committee and this took almost a whole Congress to get through from the time it was originally authorized, at which time the Corps of Engineers testified, and finally it took several years before dredges actually showed up

on the scene.

Here was a dredging project that had tremendous effect on the local area because of the size of it, the number of cubic yards of spoil that was involved, the nature of the spoil, the turbidity that was created in the dredging area and many other side effects on the surrounding environment that were caused by this project.

I couldn't find in searching a record one instance where the Corps of Engineers at the very beginning when this was in the think-through

77-724-67- -9

stage ever went to the Fish and Wildlife Service either of the Federal Government or went to the State agencies involved and said, "We have got a real problem on our hands. We are going to really dirty the water there in making this C. & D. Canal wider. Let's get together and see how we can do this with the minimum harmful effect on the environment.”

The first thing I knew about it was when a man called me and said, "The Engineers were in here and said they were going to fill in a big marsh on my place." I went to the Fish and Wildlife and got the agencies and in the 11th hour we changed this program around to try and see certain conservation aspects that would be necessary to try and save some shoreline and protect some wetlands or estuarine areas that we are trying to do right here in this legislation.

There were 3 or 4 years in which the Corps of Engineers had the opportunity to sit down with the Federal and State agencies to see if a plan could not be worked out, but to my knowledge there was never any communication whatsoever between these agencies and finally the buck stopped on my desk and everybody was raising cain about it. Why in the world in a basin that is as noble as the Chesapeake Basin and as important from a food production, from a wildlife habitat point of view, from a way-of-life point of view cannot the Corps of Engineers sit down with the agencies involved and say, "Let's see if we can't work this out, so that the best job is done with the least amount of harm."

This seems to me to be good management. Why couldn't they do that?

Mr. FITT. I am not familiar with the specific case you mentioned, Mr. Morton, but the process you described is the one which is followed by the Corps of Engineers.

The typical case involves, of course, a request from the Congress to make a study. They don't perform studies unless they are authorized and funded.

Mr. MORTON. That is correct.

Mr. FITT. Thereafter, there is generaly quite an elaborate process of public hearings, consultations with all other relevant Federal agencies and the State agencies, the local units of government, in an attempt to devise a plan that is comprehensive and suitable for whatever area is under study.

Thereafter, this report is then processed upward through Corps of Engineer channels and is made public by the division engineer and this precedes by some period of months a review of the plan by the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors.

That Board, in turn, makes a report which is a public report, which is then circulated to all the other relevant Federal and State agencies and any interested private organizations that have requested to be notified, and in some cases those who have not requested to be notified, and then those comments are gathered together and ultimately the recommendations in the plan may be modified in the light of those comments and they may not be.

This plan is then forwarded to the Congress for its consideration and hearings, and so forth.

We often hear complaints about the length of time it takes to produce the plans and part of the reason, perhaps the main reason,

for the great lapse of time is this elaborate process of securing the views of everyone who might conceivably be interested.

Mr. MORTON. I am very familiar with this process and the step-bystep way that you go about it and the publications that are forthcoming from these studies. I understand that.

I think it is unfortunate in some cases that these projects take as long to get done as they do, but maybe I should point my finger at the conservation agent or agencies involved and say, "You should have been more on the ball in getting together with the corps when you first heard about this."

But they come back and say, "Well, we weren't sure where they were going to put that spoil. They said at that time that they had enough area already in Federal land to accumulate spoil and what they couldn't accumulate in the spoil areas, that they already had, they were going to dump overboard out into the middle of the bay." So we didn't have a real coordinated plan. I think the engineering is very fine and I think they are going to end up with a beautiful way and a wonderful canal. There is no question about that, but the thing that I think is lacking, and I don't know whether this bill is going to get to it or not, the thing that is lacking in the planning is the long-term considerations which will give full opportunity for every aspect to be considered and to be perhaps to some extent compromised by at least having every facet of the basin management covered by long-term operational plans.

One of the things we don't have, and this is not the fault of the corps, but is the fault of Congress, is that we haven't authorized in estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay studies which will point now to future Federal projects that will require dredging and will require some modification of the shore.

We handle this on a piecemeal basis. The squeaking wheel gets the grease and we don't really have a coordinated effort to preserve as well as develop. I think the interests of navigation have got to share other interests, the conservation interests, seafood production and the like.

The thing that I am concerned about is, if we pass this legislation and if we amend it as you would like it amended, what have we really done? Have we really improved the management of the basins and the estuaries and the estuarine areas, or have we not?

Have we just simply talked about it and talked around it? I would like to get an expression from you as to whether the Corps of Engineers as a result of happenings, as a result of this kind of legislative proposal that we have before us today, has really given any thought to the long-range engineering planning that covers a much broader scope than just the development of navigation and commercial facilities. This is the problem.

We have a conflict of interest between the corps and conservation. I think it can be resolved. I think it has to be resolved through initiative of both the conservation agencies and the corps and vo say these talks are now underway.

Maybe the fact that a dual permit will be required will necessitate this type of coordination. I don't know whether it will or not, but I would like to make sure before you leave the stand that you feel