Virginia Mercury: “A Proposed Army Corps Change Could Affect Hundreds of Billions in Federal Funding”
RFF Senior Fellow Leonard Shabman is quoted in this article about flood resilience policies in Norfolk, Virginia.
“But Leonard Shabman, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a think tank that helped pioneer the field of environmental and natural resource economics, worries vague language will make funding decisions even more political. Army Corps projects, which he has tracked for decades, are unusual because they require individual congressional approval, he noted.
‘How they’re going to make a decision beats me. I don’t have a clue,’ he said. ‘There’s always been a tendency to try to come up with something that independent people can look at and say, ‘I may not like the way you did the calculations, but I get the decision rule.’ And now there’s no decision rule. It’s going to be a free-for-all. And it’s going to empower Congress to decide what gets built and what doesn’t. It’s going to loosen up the things that get into the hopper. So more stuff is going to be proposed and what comes out is going to be a power play.’
‘You’ve got to have metrics and ways to measure it, or it simply becomes one person announcing this is an environmental justice project, and suddenly it becomes one when it’s not,’ he added, although he noted he is not against the rule change.
What’s next for Norfolk?
One consequence of the new rules, said Shabman, may be that nature-based solutions are brushed aside by communities that ‘want a big wall just like those rich people.’
