Hire more Heroes Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Ms. EDWARDS. Madam Chair, the amendment at the desk is consistent
with the streamlining effort that has already been underway in this
bill.

I want to thank Chairman Shuster and Ranking Member DeFazio because
they have put in yeoman's work to make this a bipartisan effort.
Ultimately, my amendment will reduce the overall cost of projects and
the need for mitigation. If implemented, it will save money.
As we know all too well, highway storm water is a growing threat to
water quality, aquatic ecosystems, and the fish and wildlife that
depend on the health of these ecosystems. Moreover, the high volumes
and rapid flow of storm water runoff from highways and roads poses a
serious threat to the condition of our Nation's water and
transportation infrastructure.

Impervious surfaces create rapidly moving high volumes of untreated
polluted storm water that rush off road surfaces, erode unnatural
channels next to and ultimately underneath roadways compromising the
integrity of roadway infrastructure, and increase the stress on storm
water sewer systems, shortening the life of all of this infrastructure.

The total coverage of impervious surfaces in an area is usually
expressed as a percentage of the total land area. According to the
Chesapeake Bay program, impervious surfaces compose roughly 17 percent
of all urban and suburban lands in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The
greatest concentration of impervious surfaces in the bay watershed is
the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan areas of D.C., Maryland, and
Virginia. In fact, the Virginia Tidewater area, Philadelphia's western
suburbs, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, are also regions in our watershed
where impervious surfaces are greater than 10 percent of the total land
area.

While there are serious water quality concerns with not adequately
controlling roadway infrastructure runoff, there are also serious
infrastructure costs that are ultimately passed on to taxpayers and
ratepayers. These can be avoided if transportation authorities do more
to control and manage storm water runoff with the infrastructure assets
they plan and manage.

The aim of the amendment, of course, is to improve highway design to
better manage storm water to avoid the costly damage that poorly
managed storm water causes, and to move this up in the planning process
so that thought goes in at the beginning how best to plan, design, and
construct effectively, while also reducing costs. Now, that work is
done near the end of the process, where mitigation is often used and
costs are much higher.

My amendment would simply move up the consideration of storm water
issues in statewide and metropolitan planning. Specifically, it would require consideration of projects and
strategies that will improve the resiliency and reliability of the
transportation system and reduce or mitigate storm water impacts on
surface transportation.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment to address the problem
that is facing America's waterways and infrastructure, and to do that
early in the planning, which is more efficient and less costly.
I reserve the balance of my time.

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