Republican spending plan in Congress could slow Soo Locks construction project

Washington ― Democratic lawmakers are criticizing the government spending bill in the Republican-led U.S. House for reducing by roughly 44% the funding available for Army Corps of Engineers construction projects next year ― a change that could potentially have consequences for the $3 billion mega project to build a new Great Lakes freighter shipping lock in Sault Ste. Marie.

“I’m very worried about that,” Sen. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, said about sustained funding for the Soo Locks. “If the (bill) passes as it is, certainly there’ll be many projects in Michigan that are going to be negatively impacted by it.” 

Republicans contended Tuesday that the Soo Locks project is such a high priority that it would still receive sufficient funding.

U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman, a Republican whose northern Michigan congressional district includes the locks on the St. Marys River connecting Lakes Superior and Huron, noted the Corps can always reprogram funding from elsewhere.

“I’m not the least concerned about the negative effect on the Soo Locks budget,” Bergman said.

The House voted 217-213 on Tuesday evening to approve the government-funding bill and send it to the Senate, with the Michigan delegation voting along party lines.

The Corps has said it has the capability to spend about $450 million in fiscal 2025 on the Soo Locks project, with pricing on some of the project’s contracted work expiring at the end of September. 

Funding the project at a lower level for 2025 could result in the Corps having to renegotiate pricing for those phases of the project at a higher cost and risk extending the 2030 timeline for completion.

“We would like to see the Soo Lock project get the $450 million it needs to stay on schedule and on budget, but it’s a big lift to get there” from this new funding level, said Jim Weakley of the Lake Carriers Association, which represents U.S.-flagged Great Lakes freighters.

“If the Corps has the discretion, they probably will fund this. But the problem is they’ll have discretion over less money.”

Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Caledonia, said the spending bill provides enough construction funding for the Soo Locks project to be in line with what the Army Corps requested.

“I believe the Corps should make the locks a high priority when utilizing these funds,” said Moolenaar, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee. “I am committed to working with President Trump on building a new lock, as I did in his first administration when he approved the project after 30 years of inaction.”

The Army Corps said it’s too early to say how the Soo Locks project would be affected by the House funding bill, as it’s not clear how much it would be allocated by the Trump administration under the new funding levels.

“Until such time as a bill is passed, and we become aware of what funding is allocated specifically to this project through a work plan, we would not be able to determine any potential impacts to the cost or schedule of the project,” said Carrie Fox, spokeswoman for the Army Corps’ Detroit District.

The funding drop-off is in part a function of using what’s known as a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government for fiscal 2025, which generally means carrying over the previous year’s funding levels.

The House’s government-funding bill funds the Corps’ construction projects at the same levels as 2024 (about $1.8 billion), but it excludes roughly $1.4 billion that was repurposed last year from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill to supplement the construction account.

The Corps’ construction account would go from nearly $3.3 billion in 2024 to about $1.8 billion under the House’s bill. In Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, has also stressed that the House GOP legislation also excludes explanatory statements that lawmakers use to instruct how money should be spent on specific Army Corps projects.

“Nothing was cut. Last year, (infrastructure bill) balances were repurposed, and those funds don’t exist anymore,” said Alexia Sikora, a spokeswoman for the GOP-led House Appropriations Committee. “Again, these funds were expended for a one-time purpose. The CR provides sufficient funding to continue the Army Corps of Engineers mission and projects.”

Bergman also suggested that Democrats are being misleading by describing the CR as a funding cut. “Basically, there’s stretching of the truth to the point where you might say they were trying to mislead people. I’m not going to say they’re lying. I’m just gonna say their attempt to confuse and mislead has been pretty evident,” Bergman said.

“We’re $2 billion into a $3.3 billion project. So, again, I’m not concerned that this CR is going to have a negative effect on the Soo Locks.”

About $2.2 billion has been allocated to the Soo Locks project to date. The Army Corps’ plans call for a new 1,200-foot-long lock to mirror the only lock at the shipping complex big enough to handle the largest Great Lakes freighters that carry 71% of the tonnage that traverses the waterway connecting Lakes Superior and Huron.

An unscheduled outage of the Poe lock could disrupt the nation’s supply chain for steel, affecting automobile, appliance and heavy equipment manufacturing and, within six months, lead to 11 million lost jobs and $1.1 trillion in economic impact, the government says.

The Army Corps received billions in funding from the bipartisan infrastructure bill during 2023 and 2024, with $693 million helping to fund the Soo project.

In those two years, lawmakers in Congress cut back on their regular annual appropriations because the Corps “had plenty” of funds from the infrastructure bill to spend on construction, Weakley noted.

“What worries me is with a reduced number, the reduction is going to have to come from somewhere, and with the big dollar figure we’ve got for the Soo Locks, someone who is not from our region or who doesn’t understand the project would put less-worthy projects ahead of it,” Weakley said.

Read more at this Detroit News link: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/11/republican-spending-plan-could-slow-soo-locks-construction-project-sault-ste-marie-michigan-shipping/82279623007/

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