LeveesInside a secretive lobbying effort to deregulate federal levees

By Lisa Song, Patrick Michels, and Alex Heeb

Published 13 April 2018

Nearly a year after record Midwestern floods killed at least five people and caused $1.7 billion in damage, a secretive lobbying effort funded by Illinois and Missouri drainage districts is underway to roll back flood regulations, documents show.

Nearly a year after record Midwestern floods killed at least five people and caused $1.7 billion in damage, a secretive lobbying effort funded by Illinois and Missouri drainage districts is underway to roll back flood regulations, documents show.

The effort targets the authority of the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the nation’s federal levees – large hills that are typically built or strengthened by the Corps and are subject to its rules, but are managed by local drainage districts. Any time a district wants to permanently raise the height of a levee for more protection, it has to seek approval from the Corps, which considers whether a request would be “injurious to the public interest” before issuing a Section 408 permit.

The process is intended to prevent “levee wars,” in which communities race to build ever-higher levees at the expense of their neighbors. Levees constrict rivers, narrowing them and blocking off the floodplains that allow the water to spread out. This bottleneck effect ensures that towns with lower levees are more likely to flood.

But since mid-2016, lobbyists and attorneys working for a group called the 408 Coalition have spent at least $230,000 in taxpayer money to weaken the Army Corps’ authority to limit levee heights and influence the agency’s funding, according to thousands of pages of Coalition documents and correspondence obtained by the Telegraph of Alton, Illinois.

An analysis of the records by the Telegraph, ProPublica and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows Coalition members held dozens of meetings with top Army Corps officials and congressional staffers between October 2016 and last fall. Aided by lobbyists and lawyers at the Missouri-based law firm Husch Blackwell, the Coalition provided Congress members with white papers on their legislative goals and drafted text for pending bills.

The records reflect that the Coalition’s most prominent backer is the Sny Island Levee Drainage District, which manages a 54-mile levee system along the Mississippi River in west-central Illinois.

The Sny has long flouted the Corps’ restrictions on levee height. It pushed up its levees a decade ago without federal permission, and since then, residents across the river in Pike County, Missouri, have blamed the higher barriers for worsening floods that inundated farms and closed businesses in the riverfront towns of Clarksville and Louisiana.

A new analysis of Corps data shows that, by protecting itself, the Sny district has increased flooding upstream and in Pike County.