By a wide majority of 79 to 14, with seven senators not voting, the Senate decision overturned the President’s Bush’s veto of the bill.
The bill is aimed to provide for conservation and development of water and related resources across the US. It directs the Secretary of the Army to have the US Army Corps of Engineers undertake a series of projects in relation to flood control, navigation and environmental schemes.
While the Act is a reauthorisation of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 1986, it provides for non-federal project funding contributions, and enables performance-based partnership ventures.
The new Act emphasises the strategic need for water resource development to ensure national economic benefit, and recommends to Congress that such projects should not suffer delay due to poor management, inefficient reviews or failure to resolve disputes. It directs the Secretary to undertake hydropower, water supply, flood control and other water resources studies in the nation’s states.
It also amends the WRDA to authorise projects that improve elements and features of an estuary and also projects for the removal of dams that otherwise satisfy its requirements. The Act also amends previous legislation to provide for variation in the annually set minimum and maximum water levels in headwater reservoirs. Dan safety assistance is also authorised at locations in Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The Act also requires projects to be expedited in areas hit by floods in the last five years and have been declared official disaster areas by the president, such as New Orleans.
Further, the Act directs the president to report to Congress on US vulnerability to flood damage. Areas for focus in the report are to what extent programmes meet flood reduction needs and whether they might be contributing to economic and other development activities in flood-prone regions.
The river basins of the states of Ohio, Washington, New York, Arkansas and Missouri have been added to the list to be assessed under the Act while reducing the non-federal share of such costs after 2000.
Under the new Act, projects costing more than US$45M, including mitigation costs, are required to be peer-reviewed by independent experts appointed by relevant state governors.
