Responsibly and Professionally Invigorating Development Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Chair, I rise today to offer a commonsense amendment to the RAPID Act, a misguided bill that will disempower local leaders, including tribal leaders, and threaten the health and safety of our communities and their communities.

As a member of the Natural Resources Committee, time and time again I have witnessed the Republican majority siding with big business and gutting bedrock environmental safeguards that for decades have protected our families and our natural heritage.

My Republican friends claim that this bill is intended to protect the interest of our States and Native American tribes.

Mr. Chair, we already have a law on the books for that purpose. It is called the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, and it works. At its heart, NEPA ensures that our government is accountable to the people.

This critical law has protected the environment for more than 40 years without imposing arbitrary deadlines or limiting vital public input.

It guarantees the public an opportunity to review and comment on actions proposed by the government, enabling important perspectives that would otherwise go unnoticed. In this way, NEPA can actually serve as a check on Big Government.

Unfortunately, the RAPID Act promises the opposite, a deeply flawed process that would diminish the voice of State, local, and tribal communities.

The RAPID Act will also establish a new regulatory framework that purposely overrides the NEPA review process, limiting public input and consequently undermining the quality and integrity of Federal agency decisions.

Among its many dangerous provisions, the bill will also trigger the automatic approval of construction projects if agencies miss arbitrary deadlines, regardless of the complexity or hazard posed by such potential projects.

Though the bill includes some extremely limited and narrow exceptions for these deadlines, as it is currently written, it fails to extend those deadlines for our local communities.

My amendment would simply create a new good cause exception that would allow a deadline to be extended if a request is made from a local- or State-elected official or a local tribal leader.

While my amendment does not fix all the problems in the underlying bill, it ensures that, if this bill should pass, our local and tribal leaders will continue to be empowered, as they are currently under NEPA.

I support the goal of reducing red tape, but stripping away the ability of our local communities to have their voices heard is undemocratic and unacceptable. Mr. Chair, special interests don't need us to fight for them. Our communities do.

I urge my colleagues to support my amendment and to stand with our local and tribal leaders when it comes to projects in their own back yards that impact their homes, families, and business.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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