Posted on March 18, 2026
The federal agency that maintains the Columbia River’s shipping channel is proposing to build seven giant in-water pens as part of a $377 million project to manage dredge spoils over the next 20 years.
Meanwhile, the river’s shipping industry is working to get local ports off the hook for part of the $132 million they will soon have to pay for the project.
Shippers move tens of billions of dollars in goods on the channel each year, which in turn generates tens of thousands of jobs. But all of that depends on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and partners removing 9 million cubic yards of sediment every year to allow increasingly massive ships to reach Southwest Washington’s ports.
Now, 16 years after the channel was deepened to 43 feet, the region is running out of places to dump dredged sediment. The Corps is looking to address the problem with a new approach: placing dredged material in giant pens within the river.
The Corps has found the pens are more cost-effective than alternatives, but the effort isn’t a sure thing.
For starters, the $85 million that the ports of Vancouver, Kalama, Longview and Portland have to pay for the plan is front-loaded, meaning they’ll have to pay more in the next 10 years than the decade after that.
Even if the ports are able to shift some of that cost back to the federal government, they will still have to pay an additional $48 million for land to place dredged material.
The effort comes as the Trump administration has been increasingly hesitant to support large projects outside of data centers, military preparedness, and immigrant detention and removal.
But with so much money and so many jobs on the line in Southwest Washington, the regional shipping industry’s well-oiled advocacy machine is working to find other ways to fund the dredging project.
The plan has been a success. But by about 2017, the Corps had determined it was running out of sites for the material and would need a new plan, said Laura Hicks, a Corps’ senior planner for the project.
The Corps released a draft version of the new plan in summer 2024.
The report found current removal approaches wouldn’t be able to keep the river dredged “to the extent that shipping could be impacted internationally.”
Without enough dredging, the channel could start to fill in, leading to potential restrictions on how deep ships can sit in the water. Draft restrictions, which can be costly, are extremely rare in the system because of the Corps’ management.
About 500 ships took grain from Columbia River ports out to international markets last year. If a 3-foot-draft restriction is put in place, ships have to reduce the amount of grain they carry by roughly $4.5 million in value, said Neil Maunu, who is the executive director of the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association.
The new dredging plan concluded the placement of seven giant pens in the river called “confined aquatic placement structures” would be an important and cost-effective part of disposal for the next 20 years.
The pens would be made of pile dikes and cover about 308 acres of river, mostly in the estuary. Combined, they would have capacity to hold about 9.6 million cubic yards of material — enough to fill up the Empire State Building almost exactly eight times.
The Corps expects to remove about 180 million cubic yards in total over the next 20 years, Hicks said. The material will be placed in the pens, as well as in shallow water, in the ocean, on beaches and on land.
The Corps did not answer how much the dredging itself would cost. Budget documents for the 2025 fiscal year allocate about $81 million for operations and maintenance of the channel, and another $27 million for the mouth of the river.
‘Ports are concerned’
The ports’ nearly $85 million obligation for the new plan comes from a technicality in how the structures are classified.
While the Corps covers 100 percent of the cost of dredging the river, it requires the four Lower Columbia ports to cover one-quarter of the cost of projects that it classifies as “construction.”
And it classifies building the pens as construction. Hicks declined to say exactly how much of the $85 million is related to the pens but said “the lion’s share” of it was.
That price tag is giving the regional shipping industry heartburn, Maunu said.
“It’s a lot of money, and it’s right up front,” he said. “The ports are concerned. Like, ‘Hey, this is a lot of capital spend that we haven’t anticipated spending. We have relatively small budgets.’ ”
He said the Corps’ current rules would mean they cover 100 percent of the cost of other approaches to dredged material placement that are more expensive — such as barging material out to the ocean to dump it or paying more dredging contractors to do it.
Yet, the most cost-effective option also leaves ports with a large bill.
“This means that a construction cost share would be levied on just four entities, to support a major U.S. trade gateway that provides significant economic benefit throughout the Pacific Northwest region and the nation,” stated a 2025 letter to the Corps from senior executives at the four ports about the issue. The Port of Woodland also signed the letter.
Advocacy push
The Pacific Northwest Waterways Association has made getting that cost share requirement changed one of its three priorities this year, Maunu said.
The group is aiming to get an exemption added to this year’s Water Resources Development Act — a bill considered on two-year cycles that governs a lot of what the Corps does.
In 2024, the shipping industry tried to get the cost share waived through that year’s bill and secured a provision allowing the official in charge of civil engineering for the Army to waive the local spending. But that has not happened yet.
The Columbia River shipping system has long received significant federal support to stay globally competitive, in part because its advocacy machine has been successful at demonstrating the industry’s return on investment to Washington and Oregon’s powerful legislators.
But the tide has started to go out on that era as the Trump administration has cut funding for parts of the system and Corps nationally, instead prioritizing partnership-based project funding models or reallocating money to favored sectors.
The industry has taken notice, with ports also making the case to Washington and Oregon that keeping the system running efficiently is also in their own economic interests.
In 2024, Oregon allocated $15 million to the Lower Columbia River Channel Management Plan. And Southwest Washington ports are making a case for state funding in Olympia.
But both states are experiencing significant budget shortfalls, leading them to belt-tightening measures.
“We’ve engaged with policymakers at the state and federal levels to find solutions, but there is not a solidified path forward at this time,” said Casey Bowman, a spokesperson for the Port of Vancouver.
A representative for the Port of Longview echoed that.
Stakes
“The ports do not have this amount of money, and it could affect our ability to do economic development for years,” said Dale Lewis, the Port of Longview’s director of external affairs.
Lewis said the port would have to pay about $17 million for the confined aquatic structures construction.
Late last year, global agricultural products giant Nutrien announced it would build a $500 million to $1 billion fertilizer export terminal at the Port of Longview.
The announcement followed a decade of significant investments in infrastructure by the port that ultimately played a key role in winning the project, said Dena Horton, deputy director of the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association.
“By being able to have their port resources available to do that, they were able to attract a huge investment to the region,” she said. “Now, if they had to spend all that money helping the Corps of Engineers build operations and maintenance infrastructure, they wouldn’t have had the ability to do that.”
Horton said the system will lose out on the next generation of improvements that stand to attract future projects if regional ports have to spend “the next 10 years’ worth of capital investment money” on the pens.
Despite the funding uncertainty among ports, the Corps expects to finalize its plan for managing dredge spoils on the lower Columbia in May or June.
Hicks said that will allow the agency to start placing material at the new sites and start planning for the new in-water storage pens.
The move also kicks off the ports’ new financial obligations. That means they will have to gear up to pay their share of the first in-water pens and will also have to start buying up the $48 million of on-land sites for dredged material.
Though that $48 million price tag — and all the others in the draft report — will have likely grown due to inflation over the past year and a half.
