The United States Army Engineers Corps wants to update their procedures to improve the quality, speed and cost, and as part of this effort, body officials will no longer request authority to build a new project before reaching a 35% design threshold, recently said the head of body engineers.
Although he testified in front of the Environment Committee and Public Works of the Senate, on September 17, the lieutenant, the general, William Graham Jr. The “vast majority” of the causes is linked to not having enough information before seeking the authorization of Congress. This has often occurred when projects are still at a conceptual level, closer to 10% design and with body officials do not have details of field research.
“First, we must have engineering properly,” said Graham. “The attention here focuses on the maturity of the designs. We will not ask the authority to build new projects unless the design is advanced enough for us to really understand what we propose to build.”
Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) He wondered if the new policy could lead to a CATCH-22 in which large projects cannot move forward because the body has no resources to move them to 35% design.
“I am worried that this can lead to a situation where the army’s body simply ceases to do larger projects,” said Padilla.
Graham said that there could be exceptions, although the provision of quality projects in the calendar and within the budget requires careful planning during the design. He has pointed out the criticism of the body, for decades, that he had only looked at scattered, small and not in issues throughout the system. With the leadership of the Congress, the agency began to look at larger flood prevention systems along the Texas coast and the New York city. Both programs cost the estimates of tens of billions of dollars.
“We need to discover a way to break down -in manageable and implemented pieces so that we can know what it is proposing to build, and they must also be budgeted,” said Graham.
