BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am here today to urge our colleagues to support the Water Resources Development Act. Missouri has more than 1,000 miles of navigable waterways that transport over $4 billion worth of cargo every year.
I will say for the benefit of the Presiding Officer that it is hard at this moment not to stop and talk about what the EPA thinks navigable waters should be and what navigable waters have always been thought to be in Federal law. My State has 1,000 miles of those waterways--as I have just said, $4 billion a year. There is no reason, with world food demand anticipated to double between now and 35 or 40 years from now, with people wanting to bring some manufacturing jobs and hopefully lots of manufacturing jobs back to this country, that $4 billion number won't be much bigger than that over the next few years, and so this bill really matters.
Maintaining and improving our waterways and the infrastructure surrounding our waterways is critically important. The Mississippi River Valley is the biggest piece of contiguous agricultural ground in the would. One of the great benefits of the interior port system is it is a port system that uniquely supports some of the most productive agricultural land anywhere in the world but also that it is a natural network that has allowed our country to compete in the way it did early and the way it can now. So it is important that we maintain that system.
We also need to think about--if we have the blessings of the waterways, we also have the challenges of the waterways--protecting families in Missouri and families in other places from natural disasters. In our State, we had a surprise flood in December. It is not the only time we have ever had a New Year's Eve flood, but it is not something we anticipate. It was very big, very destructive, and very localized. So managing that is a critically important part of what happens in the Water Resources Development Act.
This is a step to prioritize these resources so that once again we are thinking about why we have flood protection, navigation, and water projects.
Specifically, in our State this bill authorizes a number of projects in the Kansas City area. The Kansas City levees themselves started in the 1940s, while maybe Harry Truman was using the desk I stand behind right now or the office I now get to use in the Russell Building, maybe while he was President and Vice President. These were projects that took about 40 years to build and now need to be actively maintained. The Kansas City levees, the Turkey Creek Basin, the Swope Park Industrial Area, and the Blue River Basin are flood control projects that protect lots of jobs and protect lots of families and in some cases ensure that the waterway can be used for navigation and still have the proper emphasis we want to have on conservation and wildlife.
The bill funds much needed drinking water and clean water programs. In so many cases, the infrastructure we have in this country below ground is even more challenged than the infrastructure we have aboveground. It is not just about using the waterways for the drinking water that is provided to many communities from the rivers--the Missouri River is a drinking water source for people who live in the Missouri State capital, and it is a drinking water source for people up and down the river in many communities. This bill focuses not only on that traditional system but also provides some additional assistance for challenged communities, for communities that need to replace lead pipes, so that through this bill communities can work on better ways to solve the important infrastructure problems they have.
The bill authorizes $25 million for the dredging of small ports on the Mississippi River System. In the last Congress, the Senator from Iowa, Mr. Harkin, and I--Senator Harkin has now retired, but Senator Klobuchar stepped up to cochair with me the Mississippi River Caucus that looks at the river as the asset it is. As we try to take traffic off the highway system and off the rail system and put it on the water, if it is going to be on the water sooner rather than later, all these ports matter. So this bill takes a further step in encouraging looking at the small ports, the interior ports, the almost totally export ports.
There is nothing wrong with buying things from other people, but actually, economically, there is a tremendous, positive advantage to selling things to other people, and that is what the interior port system is all about. Not only is it an export port system, it basically serves twice the land mass of a coastal port. If a coastal port effectively serves 250 or 300 miles inland, the Mississippi River port would serve that same amount in all directions, 300 miles each way. So looking at those ports not for specifically the individual tonnage that might go out of the port but how they fit into a whole system is very important.
In many instances, the Corps said: Well, they do not export a million tons, so we don't want to dredge that port because it is only a 900,000-ton port. But I think we need to look at this in different ways, and this bill creates the opportunity to do that.
There is another measure that has an impact very close to where I live, Springfield, MO--Table Rock Lake. It is not on the lake but several miles from the lake. Owners there are worried that the Corps is not listening as it comes up with a shoreline management plan. If you don't live on the shore or if you aren't affected by the economy of the lake, it may not matter much, but it matters a lot if you are in one of those two categories. These plans don't come along very often, and so this measure addresses the concerns property owners have that they are simply not being listened to.
The public and those directly affected by changes in the plan for things such as awarding boat dock permits and shoreline zoning need to have a say in what that plan will look like for a long time because once these plans are in place, the Corps always has many reasons not to look at the shoreline management plans. The extra time here creates a comment period that lets the affected people be heard.
I will say on this topic that when you talk to the Corps about variations in the plan, there are always a thousand reasons they can't make one. Their view is, this is a plan that took a lot of time to put in place. Well, this bill says: OK, we would agree with that. Let's take the necessary time to put it in place.
I am also glad to see that this measure ensures that a community affordability study which I drafted some language on and which we put in the Interior appropriations bill last year will be put to use by the EPA. What is a community affordability study? If you have water issues in your community--if the drinking water system has a problem, if the storm water system has a problem--if you have water issues in your community, there are often reasonable caps that say: If the Federal Government comes in and tells you that you have to do something, they have to give you enough time so that the community can afford it. Maybe that cap is no more than 4 percent or some percentage a year would be the cap on raising your water bill year after year. Well, if you raise it 4 percent a year, it doesn't take long before it is 40 percent higher than it was and then 50 percent higher than it was. That is a cap that somebody looked at, studied, and thought that even though communities never like to do this, maybe this is something communities can live with. But what if you have two or three of those instances that occur at the same time?
So what this bill does is further encourage the EPA to do something that the municipal league is really for and that my hometown of Springfield, MO, has encouraged and has been a proponent and drafter of, and that is, you have to look at the total impact on ratepayers before you tell a community they have to do something. You can put people in unbelievable economic stress by just deciding that whatever the Federal Government wants to do is what the Federal Government gets to do no matter what impact it has on that community. That sort of integrated permitting will give communities what they need to really make the changes they need to make in a way the community can live with and deal with and, more importantly, families in the community can live with.
This has some bipartisan compromise language that I have long supported to encourage the safe disposal of coal ash. I have heard from rural electric utilities that the rules handed down by EPA are too harsh. The language here will help address those concerns in a bipartisan way.
I urge my colleagues to support this measure. I am grateful for the leadership we have seen from Senator Inhofe, the chairman, and the ranking member, Senator Boxer, who served previously as the chairman of this committee. They have come together with a bipartisan package that makes sense and that impacts the lives of families, that has an impact on our economy and allows these projects to have a future they otherwise wouldn't have and new rules to be put in place that wouldn't be put in place.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT