Plan to idle river locks hours daily draws flak

— Arkansas River shippers say they’re concerned about U.S. Army Corps of Engineer plans to shut down locks on the Arkansas River’s McClellan-Kerr River Navigation System for four hours daily and to restrict recreational watercraft users to two periods of lock passage each day.

“Not too many people are happy about it,” said Marty Shell, who operates Five Rivers Distribution LLC, a private port in Van Buren. “We’re friends of the Corps, but none of us want it.”

Commercial shippers like Shell are concerned about costly delays in travel time and higher fuel costs.

Corps of Engineers officials say the plan, part of a nationwide cost-saving effort, would preserve the locks’ aging machinery as long as possible in an era of declining budgets.

“We want to reduce swings of the gates” at the locks, said John Balgavy, chief of the operations division in the Corps’ Little Rock District. River locks raise and lower water levels in contained areas to allow barges and recreational boats to navigate uneven levels of a waterway.

Public meetings on the issues will begin Wednesday in Little Rock at the Witt Stephens, Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center at 2 p.m. and at 5 p.m. Three more meetings at Russellville, Ozark and Pine Bluff will follow over the next eight days.

The workshops are not public hearings but will allow attendees to talk one-on-one with Corps officials.

The Corps of Engineers has operated 18 locks on the 445-mile McClellan-Kerr system in Arkansas and Oklahoma for 24 hours a day, every day, since the system opened in 1971, Corps officials say. When a crew performed routine maintenance on a lock all those years, workers stopped to let boats through, Balgavy said Monday.

Under the new plan, no watercraft could pass during the four-hour stoppages except in cases of emergency, Balgavy said. “Once we start, we’re going to stay closed for four hours,” he said.

The federal agency started the four-hour shutdowns Oct. 1 at two locks in Arkansas - the James W. Trimble Lock at Fort Smith and the Ozark-Jeta Taylor Lock at Ozark - and at three locks on the river in Oklahoma. It’s considering similar closures for the rest of the system.

Engineers estimate the useful life for lock machinery at 50 years, Balgavy said, although elsewhere the Corps is still using some locks that are more than 100 years old, he said. But on the Arkansas River, “we’re seeing a trend of more breakdowns,” he said. “As we spend more time fixing things, we spend less time doing preventive maintenance.”

“Our goal is to keep the system as reliable as possible with our flatline-to-declining budgets,” he said.

The Little Rock district’s navigation budget is $24.2 million for the current year, down from $39.3 million in 2010. Five years ago the budget was about the same as today’s - $24.6 million in 2007.

Commercial shippers say they’re sympathetic with those issues, but worry that four-hour delays in operation of locks - which they say would essentially close down parts of the river - will drive up costs for everyone, including consumers.

Shipping interests are concerned they will have to run faster or slower to avoid a delay, which would increase costs, said Gene Higginbotham, executive director of the Arkansas Waterways Commission, the state agency charged with promoting commercially navigable waterways. Higginbotham has been talking to shippers and recreational water users around the state about the issue.

Katie McManners, a spokesman for the waterways commission, said her group is “very concerned.”

Disrupting service will render the whole system less efficient, she said. “Every time barges have to either stop or alter their plan, it’s going to take longer and increase fuel costs.We think freight ultimately will be transferred off barge to other types of transport.”

The Corps also is proposing restrictions to the hours that recreational boaters could use the locks. Recreational users would get time periods each day - one in the morning, one in the afternoon or evening - to use locks. The idea, said Balgavy, is to group many small, recreational watercraft together for a single passage through a lock.

“One towboat and barges may fill up a whole chamber” at a lock, said Corps spokesman Laurie Driver. “But you can put a lot of recreational boats together and lock them through at the same time.”

“We’re talking to fishermen and others about what times work best for them,” Balgavy said.

The policy is proposed to start at two of the busiest recreational locks near Little Rock, the Murray and David D. Terry locks.

Arkansas fishing enthusiasts have already said they worry the changes could hurt sports fishing and quash hopes of Little Rock ever hosting the Bassmaster Classic or another Elite Series Tournament.

“Why would you want to under those rules?” Jerry McKinnis of Little Rock, a principal owner of Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, or BASS, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last week. “You just couldn’t.”

The Corps is looking at the Murray and David D. Terry locks because they are the only ones on the Arkansas River that now meet the “high recreational” criteria of use.

Balgavy said other rivers besides the Arkansas are also shutting down locks for maintenance and limiting use by recreational boaters. One is the Ouachita-Black River that flows from South Arkansas into Louisiana.

“We’re doing what we can to prolong the life of the locks,” he said. “We see the day when big things break down and we won’t have the money to repair them.”

Higginbotham, of the waterways commission, said he and others are working with Arkansas’ congressional delegation to look at legislation to be introduced later this year to help with the Corps’ budget woes.

“The key is to reduce the delay factor” of shutting down the locks, Higginbotham said. “The Corps doesn’t want it. We don’t want it. The users don’t want it. If we continue working together we’ll come up with something that makes sense.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/06/2012

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