MEDILL NEWS SERVICE > Power Trips: Congress hits the road

St. Louis Group Send Congressmen Down the Mississippi
By BRIAN D. SABIN
MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON - In August 2005 the St. Louis Agri-Business Club spent thousands to fly key congressional staff members to St. Louis to examine a multi-billion dollar Mississippi River project that critics call a "boondoggle."

The club's Web site names 15 staffers who attended the 2005 event, but congressional travel disclosure records show only six filed travel reports as required by House and Senate rules.

The St. Louis trips did not involve the exotic destinations or lavish spending that caused problems for lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who pleaded guilty in January to bribing members of Congress. But they are examples of how privately funded trips play a role in Washington policymaking and how rules governing them are poorly enforced.

One of the nine congressional aides not showing up in the disclosure reports insisted that he had filed, and that the disclosure must have been lost. Supervisors of two others were uncertain whether their staffers had followed the rules. Three no longer work on Capitol Hill and could not be reached, and two did not respond to requests for interviews.

Another staffer listed on the Agri-Business Club's site said she was on another trip at the time; the required report for her other trip is on file.

Accepting a privately paid trip and failing to file a disclosure violates House and Senate ethics rules and possibly federal law, according to congressional ethics experts.

"There's an argument to be made that the Justice Department will look at a failure to file as evidence of intent to conceal if there is an allegation," said Stanley Brand, a Washington attorney who specializes in congressional ethics rules. "It is theoretically a violation of federal false statement statutes not to file these statements if they are required to do so."

The St. Louis Agribusiness Club has sponsored three such excursions since 2001, paying about $19,000 for at least 27 congressmen and staffers to travel. The trip brought those travelers face-to-face with agriculture and business leaders in and around St. Louis. One major focus of the tour: A more than $2 billion navigation project proposed for the Upper Mississippi River.

The six staffers who did file disclosure reports for the 2005 trip had tabs totaling about $4,000.

Overall, members of Congress and their staff cut their privately sponsored travel this year by two-thirds, according to a Medill News Service analysis of travel disclosure forms from Jan. 1, 2000, through mid-August 2006. They took trips worth about $2.7 million in the first eight months of this year, compared with $8.3 million in each in the two previous years, a drop-off that some attribute to ethics scandals in Congress.

The congressional aides on the 2005 St. Louis trip say immediately after their arrival they were herded onto a bus and driven to a soybean farm. They spent the next three days in fields, factories, and on river barges. One described it as the "hardest" trip he'd ever taken.

Disclosures on file show the St. Louis trips also included tickets to a Cardinals baseball game, Anheuser-Busch brewery tours and a VIP tour of the Gateway Arch.

"When you have a workshop, you have to make very clear that it's educational and a good use of time," said the St. Louis Agri-Business Club's legislative chair, Paul Rohde.

Trip sponsors and supporters of the river lock project say the investment is needed to fix a transport system on the Upper Mississippi River that is inefficient and crumbling.

Economists who studied the proposal counter that it will never pay for itself. Taxpayers for Common Sense called it "a boondoggle of the worst order."

The project would add seven new 1,200-foot locks at the river's busiest points. Currently those spots and most of the lock-and-dam systems on the Mississippi have 600-foot locks, which are not long enough to fit long river barges.

"You go through a series of 20-plus locks, uncouple and then re-couple the barges," Rohde said. Rohde is also the president of the Midwest Area River Coalition 2000, which helped develop the seven-lock proposal. "The compounded time of these tows backing up is costing shippers money."

The project's former chief economist agrees, but he added that the money that barge operators might eventually save with new locks would never justify the billions of taxpayer dollars needed to build them.

"If you look at the cost benefit of having these towboats go faster, at current traffic levels, you get a benefit of about a dime on a dollar," said Donald Sweeney, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lead economist studying the Upper Mississippi River project during the 1990s.

Sweeney in February 2000 filed an affidavit with the Defense Department's special counsel that said officers pressured him to manipulate data in support of the lock project and removed him from his post when he refused. His complaint triggered an investigation that found the corps used inflated river traffic figures and overestimated demand.

The corps said it revised its study and issued a report in late 2004. Those findings helped lead to the seven-lock project now being considered by Congress. But the assistant secretary of the Army with oversight of the corps has not endorsed the plan because of "too much uncertainty" about whether it is worthwhile.

The seven-lock project today is part of the Water Resources Development Act, an enormous bill that would authorize expensive projects in as many as 18 states. The bill passed the House and Senate and will become law if the two chambers agree on a final version and President Bush signs it before the year ends.

Sen. Christopher Bond, R.-Mo., sponsored the Water Resources Development Act and lauded the Upper Mississippi project at length during his floor speeches.

He attended the St. Louis workshop in 2003; disclosures show the Agri-Business Club and Midwest Area River Coalition 2000 spent more than $2,700 on trips for Bond and his staff. The coalition's board members have given $4,800 in campaign contributions to Bond since 1997, while political action committees representing their companies kicked in an additional $12,500.

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