Hire more Heroes Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. HECK of Washington. Mr. Chairman, small towns and cities alike
have reasons to manage their storm water runoff. Our streams, rivers,
lakes, and estuaries are all at risk of dangerous pollution following a
downpour.

Trust me, those of us from western Washington know this full well,
and places like Puyallup, Washington, are actually finding ways to
adjust their neighborhoods to protect surrounding waterways from
pollution.

Since 2009, Puyallup has helped residents install rain gardens to
absorb the rainfall. These rain gardens are linked by pipes that
collect the excess water from the roofs and direct it to the gardens
rather than to the streets and then into the sewer.
This is just one innovation of several great ideas that are innovated
throughout this country in places like Puyallup.

My amendment today builds on the success on the ground by simply
asking the Department of Transportation to develop best practices for
storm water management, to collect the information, and a guide on how
to implement, install, and maintain green storm water infrastructure,
and help any State that requests help with the development of such a
plan--a voluntary program, not a requirement, no new money.

Many of these innovative infrastructure practices--permeable
pavement, natural drainage swales, green roofs--are economical and
increase property values and invest in the people that make their
careers designing and building these inventions.
These new tools are both flexible and yield a strong return on
investment. The people of Puyallup, Washington, get that.

They know and I know and you know that we can't let water carry oil
from our cars, pesticide from our lawns, and other pollutants into
Clarks Creek or the Puyallup River or the Puget Sound.
We can't do that and keep a strong economy or a desirable location
for business and living. We can't let runoff kill, as an example, our
cherished Coho salmon.

So I ask you to support the promise of these innovative economical
ideas to manage our storm water and to get DOT involved.
This is the best of federalism. No new money, no mandatory program,
just a way to get the information out, which the Federal U.S. DOT is in
the perfect position to collect and make available.
Mr. Chair, I yield to the gentleman from the Sixth Congressional
District of Washington (Mr. Kilmer).

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Mr. HECK of Washington. With all due respect to the chair of the
committee, that isn't included in the current legislation and is
clearly not the intent of the amendment. The intent of the amendment is
to ask them to accumulate best practices. Yes, they have programs where
they promote and they advocate. This is to ask them to go out and find
these programs like we talked about in Puyallup which are unusual and
innovative and which aren't yet in the manual so that they can share.
This is information sharing on a scale that they don't currently do.

In fact, Mr. Chairman, it would help with a serious problem; but
given the Chair's opposition to this, I will only ask that he consider
taking a deeper dive into what we are trying to accomplish here because
it solves a problem.

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