As supporters of the decades-long effort to build a pump station at Steele Bayou wait for a response from the Army concerning newly found documents from an earlier version of the project, options could extend to the legal realm.

Officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency and the Board of Mississippi Levee Commissioners met at Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality offices in Jackson to update one another on recent developments, levee board chief engineer Peter Nimrod said.

While no legal action has been filed against the EPA, which vetoed the $220 million plan in August, a suit remained on supporters’ table of options coming out of the meeting, Nimrod said.

“It’s sure a possibility,” Nimrod said. “It’s in the Corps headquarters’ lap at this point.”

A spokesman for the Corps’ Vicksburg District office confirmed a meeting took place but was unable to specify who attended.

By making an open records request, levee commissioners obtained letters dated from March 1983 showing top Corps staff notified Congress of a final environmental study and other information as part of the approval process.

In response to letters from U.S. Sens. Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker questioning the agency’s veto authority, the EPA cited the absence of proof of such environmental data. Since the documents’ release, both senators have asked Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works John Paul Woodley if the Corps sent the documents to EPA and, if so, whether the agency responded.

Section 404(c), a provision of the Clean Water Act dealing with dredged or fill material at defined sites in U.S. waters and wetlands and its impact to wetlands and wildlife, was cited by the EPA in its 74-page veto, just the 12th veto issued by the agency on such grounds and the first since 1990. 

Supporters have said the project should be exempt from veto under another part of the law that says projects are not subject to veto if authorized by Congress before the CWA was amended in 1977 and if environmental reviews were done and sent to Congress. To that end, Cochran and Wicker have asked the Corps if the project was analyzed to see if it fell under the exemption, which is Section 404(r).

As proposed, the pump station is the final piece of the Yazoo Backwater Project, authorized by Congress in 1941. Its last major piece was the Yazoo Backwater Levee, completed in 1978. The EPA took into account the multiple revisions in the plan in its veto, but concluded the project would adversely affect area wetlands and wildlife.

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Contact Danny Barrett Jr. at dbarrett@vicksburgpost.com.