Water Resources Development Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, we are going to have a vote here shortly, and it is going to be one of the major, significant votes.

First of all, I know the occupier of the Chair is very aware of the things we have been doing in the committee called Environment and Public Works. Most of the stuff we have been doing is very meaningful, including the highway bill, the chemical bill, and now the WRDA bill. These are all things that have to be done.

Last week I talked about the WRDA bill and why it is important to pass it now. Just to take a look at some of the major news stories from the past few months, earlier this summer we saw algae wash up on the beaches of Florida. This is a problem that will have significant impact on the health of Floridians, as well as negatively impacting Florida's biggest industry--tourism.

The WRDA bill 2016 has a solution to the problem. We have a project that will fix Lake Okeechobee to prevent this problem in the future.

I know a little bit about this because a lot of people are not aware that in my State of Oklahoma we have more miles of freshwater shoreline than any of the 50 States. That is because most of them are manmade lakes. They have a dam down here with lots of shoreline going around them, but, nonetheless, I had a personal experience with what they call blue-green algae. You think you are on your deathbed when you are there.

This chart behind me shows a plume in St. Lucie, FL. It is a picture of an algae plume caused by deteriorating water conditions. Not only are these plumes environmentally hazardous, but they also are economically debilitating to communities living along South Florida's working coastline. Communities along the coast depend on clean, freshwater flows to drive tourism.

Just weeks ago, we saw historic flooding in Baton Rouge, LA, and we have seen communities destroyed and lives turned upside down. In this WRDA bill, there are two ongoing Corps projects that will prevent the damages we saw. WRDA 2016 directs the Corps to expedite the completion of these projects.

The second chart shows the flooding in Baton Rouge, LA. We can no longer use a fix-as-it-fails approach as it concerns America's flood control. There is just too much on the line. We are not just talking about economic loss but devastating floods. We have all seen that, experienced that, and we are talking about loss of human life. So this is not an option.

Last year there were several collisions in the Houston Ship Channel. Due to a design deficiency, the channel is too narrow and the Coast Guard has declared it to be a precautionary zone. The Houston Ship Channel collision in 2015 was a serious one, and without this bill, the navigation safety project to correct this problem will not move forward.

Last week I spoke about what we will lose if we don't pass this important legislation. There are 29 navigation flood control and environmental restoration projects that will not happen. There will be no new Corps reforms to let local sponsors improve infrastructure at their own expense. I am talking about this for a minute because this is significant. They are willing to spend their own money and yet it is not legal for them to do. We correct that.

There will be no FEMA assistance to States to rehabilitate unsafe dams.

There will be no reforms to help communities address clean water and safe drinking water infrastructure mandates. This is something that those of us from rural States--in my State of Oklahoma, we have a lot of small communities, and there is nothing that horrifies them more when they have an unfunded mandate. They say we are going to have to treat the water and it is going to cost $14 million. They don't have any access to that kind of money. I suggested last week that there are a lot of similar problems. So this goes a long way to correcting these unfunded mandates. When I was mayor of Tulsa, the biggest problem we had was unfunded mandates.

Without this bill, there will be no new assistance for innovative approaches to clean water and drinking water needs, and there will be no protection for coal utilities from runaway coal ash lawsuits. We will be addressing this and recognizing that there is a great value to coal ash if properly used.

These are not State problems or even regional problems, but what we have is a bill that addresses problems faced by our Nation as a whole.

To reiterate how important this bill is, I want to give a few more real examples to show how the problems we are facing now are affecting our citizens, the people who sent us here, and in Washington, this is what we are supposed to be doing.

The water resources of this bill expand our economy and protect infrastructure and lives by authorizing new navigation, flood control, and ecosystem restoration projects, all based on a recommendation from the Corps of Engineers and a determination that the projects will provide significant national benefits.

The Corps has built 14,700 miles of levees that protect billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure and homes. These are referred to as high-hazard dams or high-hazard levees, and that definition means that if something happens to one, people will die. It is not saying people will be hurt; people are going to die. We have many examples of that so the Corps projects nearly $50 billion a year in damages. Many of these levees were built a long time ago and some have failed just recently.

Chart 4 is the Iowa River levee breach. If that doesn't tell the story, the significance of this--this is a levee in Iowa that was overtopped and eventually breached by disastrous floodwaters. In many cases, levees like this one were constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers decades ago but no longer meet the Corps' post-Katrina engineering and design guidelines. WRDA 2016 will end the bureaucratic nightmare local levee districts face by allowing them to increase the level of flood protection most of the time at their own expense when the Corps is rebuilding after a flood--something they can't do now.

Let's look at the economic benefits of investing in our Nation's port and inland waterway system. We need to invest in our ports and inland waterway system to keep the cost of goods low. If we don't do that, costs will go up, and of course we want to keep creating good-paying jobs.

WRDA 2016 has a number of provisions that will ensure we grow the economy, increase our competitiveness in the global marketplace, and promote long-term prosperity. These provisions include important harbor-deepening projects, such as those in Charleston, SC; Port Everglades, FL; and Brownsville, TX.

Take Charleston as an example. They have a 45-foot harbor. Now that they have expanded the Panama Canal and we have the boats called Panamax vessels going through--those are the great big vessels, and this poster gives you an idea of what can be carried on those. The problem with the Panamax vessels is that they take up 50 to 51 feet in the harbor. What happens to Charleston, SC, if they have the big vessels coming through the Panama Canal, coming up to come into our harbors in the United States, they have to instead go into one of the harbors in the Caribbean and divide up the containers. It is very expensive. That is just one of several of the harbors we are working on.

Everyone knows the Corps' maintenance budget is stretched thin, but WRDA 2016 comes up with a solution. This is a solution that we have in the bill we will be voting on, and we will have the major vote tonight. In the WRDA bill, we will let local sponsors, such as ports, either give money to the Corps to carry out the maintenance or get in and start maintaining using their own dollars. That is something you would think they could do now, but they can't. That is in this bill. That was the major thing the ports were pushing for in this bill.

What about in communities? I mentioned that in my State of Oklahoma, we have a lot of rural towns that don't really have the resources to do a lot of these things in the form of mandates. The bill provides Federal assistance to communities facing unaffordable EPA safe water and clean water mandates. WRDA 2016 targets these Federal dollars to those who need it the most. I know that years ago when I was the mayor of Tulsa, that was the biggest concern we had, and it is even more of a concern in these small communities. So we do it by having assistance for smaller, disadvantaged communities, with priority for underserved communities that lack basic water infrastructure; assistance for lead service line replacement, with a priority for disadvantaged communities; and assistance to address the very costly sewer overflow system.

It is worth noting that all the money in this bill is either subject to the Budget Control Act caps that govern the annual appropriations bills or is fully offset.

This is an introduction to economics. By passing this legislation and securing the appropriate funding, we can improve economic opportunities for all Americans. This is a critical moment. We must get back to regular order, passing WRDA every 2 years. We went through a period in 2007--we didn't have a WRDA bill following that until 2014. The year 2014 was the last time we did it. We decided then that if we are supposed to do it every 2 years, then starting in 2014, we are going to do it. The best evidence of that is that we are going to do it tonight.

So we will have a 2016 budget. Doing this will help us modernize the water transportation infrastructure through flood protection and environmental restoration around the country. The process we follow in this is very open. I think one of the reasons we have been successful in our committee doing the Transportation bill, the chemical bill, and now this bill, is because everybody knows what is going on and they have time to determine what is the best thing for their State.

Way back on December 9, we sent this bill from the committee to all Members of the Senate saying: We are going to do the WRDA bill, so go ahead and start working on amendments. They did that, and then, of course, for the last few weeks, we have been talking about getting amendments down to the floor, and we have done that. We brought a substitute amendment that was a result of that work to the full Senate on September 8. That amendment included over 40 provisions that were added after the committee markup.

Finally, last week I came to the floor and let all of you know that Senator Boxer and I needed to see your amendments by noon on Friday for the managers' package. By noon on Friday, we had amendments in. We considered some 35 provisions, and we have addressed most of these--I think to some degree all of them. Now those provisions are in the Inhofe-Boxer amendment that we filed today and hope to get consent to adopt shortly after the cloture vote tonight.

This has been a very open and collegial process, and all Members have had their concerns and priorities heard. We have done our best to address Members' priorities. After cloture this evening, we will continue to do our best to clear germane amendments until final passage this week.

I am very excited that we are going to be able to get this done. A lot of people sit back and say that nothing ever gets done in Washington. I have to say that in our committee we get things done, and we are going to get this done tonight.

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