Page 24: of Marine News Magazine (June 2006)

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tially catastrophic disruption of our nation's industrial, energy and chemical sectors. We simply must succeed in con- vincing policymakers that the time for action is now.

MN: So, you feel investment in Opera- tions and Maintenance (O&M) is the most pressing challenge facing the inland waterways industry today?

DM: With 134 of 240 O&M-funded locks now over 50 years old, failure to adequately fund system maintenance is like a series of ticking time bombs waiting to explode. Unscheduled outages are becoming more frequent, and with each outage, the most serious traffic delays and idle equipment cost ranges in the millions.

And this does not affect only the inland navigation industry, but also industries that rely on our system, such as power generation, fertilizer, agriculture, petrole- um, coal, and chemical companies.

Although service interruptions have been manageable so far, O&M related outages will become more frequent and more severe unless we are successful in stimu- lating significant change in Washington.

While we appreciate how the President's budget for FY 2007 addresses "high-per- forming" inland navigation projects, such as the Olmsted Locks and Dam, tight funding for O&M means maintenance and repair on a "fix-as-fail" basis, which is unsatisfactory. A proposed change in this year's budget is that a number of major rehabs have been transferred from the new construction/rehabilitation budget to the O&M budget. While this may seem to be a logical move, it takes scarce dollars from necessary, but less costly O&M needs, and so we prefer that the new pro- posal not be adopted. Congress and OMB need to take a longer term, more compre- hensive view of inland navigation as a system, rather than a huge collection of disparate "projects."

MN: If you could have the federal gov- ernment change one policy, what would it be?

DM: It would have to be our current approach to funding O&M. We need to move from a short-term, single-year, ran- dom "project" approach to a longer-term, systematic "investment" approach. Over the years, we've done a reasonably good job in removing key "pinch points" in the system by the completion of priority cap- ital projects; but O&M is a bigger chal- lenge because there are so many more projects to manage, and information about

O&M expenditures is often difficult to get.

If we continue on our current path, O&M funding will remain flat even as the pro- ject portfolio grows and ages. This is a recipe for disaster. Instead, we need to adopt a new process which generates funding for a 3-year or 5-year sequence of O&M projects selected on a prioritized, system-wide basis. 24 • MarineNews • June, 2006

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Parker Towing (Continued on page 51)

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