Water Resources Development Act of 2005
WATER RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT ACT OF 2005 -- (House of Representatives - July 14, 2005)
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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me the time. I thank her for her very hard and thoughtful work on this bill.
I thank the gentleman from Tennessee, (Chairman Duncan) as well. I appreciated the hearings you had trying to press us really to new plateaus on water projects. I am grateful for the inclusion in the manager's amendment of an amendment that would require the Secretary to coordinate with the governor, the mayors, for a 10-year plan for restoration of the Anacostia River which flows within sight of the Congress. In many ways, it is the Congressional River, not only because it is so near, but because if you will forgive me, when Congressional toilets flush on a rainy day, the waste from the Anacostia, the waste goes into the Anacostia River and finds its way all of the way down to the Chesapeake Bay, one of the great wonders of the United States.
This is about more than beauty, however; it is about health and the ecologically integrity of the waterways of this entire region. The Federal Government is a major offender. One-third of the sewer system here serves the Federal presence. The Federal Government is a rate payer; it would not be a rate payer, of course, if it was not strongly and significantly involved. The Federal Government built the sewer system here 100 years ago. The Corps of Engineers still runs it.
But the Federal Government is not a major contributor to the billion dollar combined sewer overflow problem, much of it of its own Federal making.
There are many projects in this bill. We do have $55 million in this bill, for which I am very grateful, but historically, if you look over the last 20 years, there have been projects, large amounts of money to jurisdictions and projects which have absolutely no relationship to the Federal sector.
Here we have the Federal sector deeply involved, a billion-dollar problem, and we have yet to really get to the bottom of it.
I want to particularly thank you for the way in which the Chairman and the ranking member have understood this problem, and for the ways they have made us understand that part of the problem is a larger one, our approach to water rehabilitation, which is starkly different from the way we understand we have to rehabilitate roads. We cannot see what is happening in our water structures. We can see what is happening on our roads. It is time we saw what is happening to our health when we do not deal with our waterways in the same way.
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