Conservationists forge coalition for water projects

More than 100 conservation leaders from across the nation are in New Orleans this week to create a national campaign to lobby Congress for ecosystem restoration projects like Louisiana's coastal restoration program.

Dubbed "Restore America's Great Waters," the new effort would forge a coalition of organizations to push Congress to authorize individual projects and seek as much as $200 billion to pay for them.

The coalition also could lobby Congress to change the traditional role of the Army Corps of Engineers in overseeing construction of restoration projects, perhaps getting Congress to turn construction over to different combinations of agencies.

Participating organizations ranged from the National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund and Ducks Unlimited to the People for Puget Sound, Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and the Brookings Institution.

This is the third attempt to create a coalition of supporters of individual restoration projects, said Bill Leary, a former policy adviser at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Past efforts failed because of concerns that joining a national group would hurt individual projects' chances of getting funded, he said.

But the election of President Barack Obama means such a coalition will likely get a warmer reception, he said.

And such a coalition is long overdue because the existing congressional approval process does not work for such complex projects, he said.

Historically, Congress has lumped authorizations into a Water Resources Development Act that's supposed to be approved every two years. But arguments over how best to approve such projects, the role of the corps in building them, and their cost, have resulted in only two such bills being approved in this decade.

The new organization would try to garner political support at the state level -- the nine major efforts lie within the borders of 22 states -- and among the 125 million potential voters in the affected congressional districts, organizers said....