Recent legislation presented by Senator Kit Bond of Missouri has potential major consequences for the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) valley. It proposes to spend billions of dollars on a combination of lock upgrades and other navigation aids and environmental restoration and monitoring.

Big bucks would be spent here in the Mississippi valley.

The legislation responds to 12 years of bickering between environmental and towing interests. What the legislation recognizes is that BOTH sides are right.

It is time for Congress to stop the squabbling and bickering and make a deal.

Moreover, it is time for people in this beautiful valley who don't see themselves as either industry advocates or environmentalists to wake up to their own interests in this important legislation.

These interests can be summarized as tourism, recreation, and quality of life.

The tourist and recreational interest of the UMR add up to better than $7 billion a year.

Then there are the quality-of-life values of living in this valley with river pools, eagles, heron, egrets, and all the rest as our front yard.

Squabbling and inaction threaten the towing industry and also threaten environmental concerns as backwaters fill in and river habitat disappears. Squabbling threatens quality of life and a good deal of the economy of the Mississippi Valley.

Since 1992, there has been plenty of time for environmentalists to highlight the towing industry's inability to prove for certain that lock improvements will pay off. They've become world-class economists in the process, arguing over an imaginary future 50 years away.

To the extent that agricultural products don't continue to be shipped but are instead processed here in the Midwest, lock improvements might not be cost-effective. An ethanol plant is an example of this "on-site value-added" possibility, using a county's worth of corn. The ethanol product drives Midwestern cars, lessening our demand for foreign oil.

But the fact is that American agriculture still supplies the needs of much of the world. And if grain is going to be shipped from the Midwest, it is an environmental horror to think how such volumes could be transported by rail or truck. Moreover, the industry has paid special taxes for decades precisely for improvements to keep itself operating. And the industry is betting that lock improvement is what it needs to keep operating.

A dozen years of squabbling has convinced everyone in Congress that the legislative solution has to be a compromise, a combination of environmental and towing projects.

The fly in the ointment is in the word "authorizes." Congress has authorized things before only to fail to come through on its promises.

For example, the special towing tax has been accruing in its trust account-but it isn't doing the industry any good on the Upper Miss. Understandably, the industry is exasperated that it can't get its own money spent on improvements.

On the environmental side, there's something called EMP-the Environmental Management Program. EMP rebuilds islands and other habitat that natural forces of an impounded river destroy. The original deal in Congress authorized $20 million a year.

Congress hasn't lived up to its original authorization, even less to the 1999 inflationary upgrade to $33.4 million. From year to year, river advocates fight a recurrently losing battle to keep partial funding from further real decline.

Last year, EMP made important strides toward full funding. This year, however, Congress seems again out to gut the president's budget for EMP.

So it's time for a deal. Let's cut to the chase.

It's time for Congress to live up to its commitment to navigation and time for Congress to address the major environmental, recreational, and quality-of-life issues of an impounded river.

There's more at stake than just towing and the environment. For most of us, the tourist, recreational, and quality-of- life interests will always be the most important and the hardest to organize for appropriate consideration.

Happily, drawdowns and other recent engineering miracles can serve environment and tourist, recreation, and quality-of-life interests.

Congress has authorized academic studies that ignore previous commitments and that have cost the taxpayer years of EMP funding.

Enough talk. Enough study of an imaginary future. Enough bickering over flaws in the other guy's arguments.

It's time to get back to reality, time to get back to commitments made and taxes already collected. Time to do things for the river that benefit all of us and all the critters dependent on the river as well. It is an easy bet that it will be worth the money to save the treasure of a multi-purpose Mississippi River.

Paul Grawe is an English professor at Winona State University in Winona, Minn.