Water Resources Development Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mrs. CAPITO. Mr. President, I am here today to speak in support of the Water Resources Development Act, or what we call WRDA. I thank Chairman Inhofe and Ranking Member Boxer for the way they have worked very well together to get this very important piece of legislation across the finish line, as they did with the Transportation bill. This piece of legislation has broad bipartisan support.

As we know, West Virginia suffered historic flooding this summer. We can see this in Greenbrier County, WV, on June 25, 2016. This shows how swollen and filled all the waterways were. We lost 23 West Virginians from the storms, and tens of thousands suffered catastrophic damages to their homes and to their livelihoods. WRDA contains a number of provisions that will help prevent this kind of devastation in the future. We can no longer wait until it fails to fix our Nation's infrastructure.

In addition to a major loss of life, communities across West Virginia are dealing with significant economic losses that will take years to recover. Our friends in Louisiana are going through the same, very difficult building back.

Let me touch on some of the highlights of the WRDA bill.

I sponsored a provision in WRDA with my fellow Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Manchin, to study the feasibility of implementing projects for flood risk management within West Virginia's Kanawha River Basin--something such as this--to prevent this. This bill also addresses dam safety and includes a provision I have been working on with Senator Jack Reed. I thank him for his hard work in this area.

According to the Army Corps of Engineers' ``National Inventory of Dams,'' there are more than 14,000 high-hazard potential dams in the United States. As we know, the State of West Virginia has a lot of mountains, a lot of valleys, a lot of water, and a lot of dams. Some 422 of those dams are located in my small State of West Virginia. Put simply, when a dam has high-hazard potential, it means that if the dam fails, people will lose their lives and their property.

This provision allows for $530 million over 10 years for a FEMA program to fix those dams. I know that States across the Nation would welcome this provision.

Flood prevention and mitigation is only one of the important parts of this WRDA bill. WRDA also has drinking water infrastructure--an issue, again, that is very important to all of us. In my State of West Virginia, we dealt with this firsthand, in 2014, following the Freedom Industries spill into the Elk River. As we may recall, that caused 600,000 people to lose their water for a large period of time--several weeks in some cases.

WRDA provides assistance to small, disadvantaged, and underserved communities. It will replace lead service lines in these communities and address sewer overflows. We have so much aging infrastructure in this country. It includes $170 million to address lead emergencies-- like those in Flint, MI--and other public health consequences. It provides $70 million to capitalize the new Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act, better known as WIFIA. That program provides loans for water and wastewater infrastructure anywhere in the country. This program is modeled after a similar and highly successful program that supports our highways.

Maximizing the use of our waterways is another important part of WRDA. In my State, our rivers not only provide commercial transport but also vital recreational opportunities. I have submitted a bipartisan amendment, which I hope will be accepted into the final bill, that emphasizes the increasing use of locks along the Monongahela River for recreational use.

Finally, WRDA includes consensus legislation to allow EPA to review and approve State permitting programs for coal ash disposal. The EPA's coal ash rule went into effect last October, but EPA does not currently have the authority to approve our State permitting programs. This bill fills that gap, benefiting utilities, States, and the environment by authorizing State oversight of coal ash disposal. There is no other environmental regulation solely enforced simply through private lawsuits, which is what we are seeing. So this bill fixes that by giving States the authority, and it empowers local entities to help keep their infrastructure strong and functioning.

Lastly, the bill gets us back to a regular schedule of passing WRDA every 2 years. Doing so will allow us to continue to modernize our water transportation infrastructure and keep up with flood protection and environmental restoration needs across the country.

So let's seize this opportunity. This is a significant bill with a number of benefits for a lot of States all across the country. This legislation proactively addresses a number of concerns. It will bring short-term and long-term gains to our economy, and it will show the American people that Congress can come together in a bipartisan way to fix problems, to support needed improvements to our infrastructure, and to make the right investments in our communities.

Lastly, I wish to add that the devastating floods we had in West Virginia took 23 lives, but what it showed us as West Virginians is what a great Nation we live in. I want to take the time to thank people from across this country who drove to West Virginia, who sent money to West Virginia, who raised money for West Virginians, who sent supplies, and who said prayers for all the many families who were devastated and still suffer the devastation from a flood such as this throughout our State.

I think we do sometimes focus a little bit too much on what is going wrong in this country. For me, one of the things that is going right is the volunteerism, the benevolence, the loving embrace that we felt in West Virginia from the rest of the country when we went through such a devastating flood but that other areas of the country feel when they suffer like consequences.

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