Great Lakes Authority

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today with considerable anticipation as Great Lakes Members introduce legislation to create the Great Lakes Authority.

The Great Lakes Authority is an instrumentality that will unlock our freshwater, industrial heartland's full potential for the century ahead.

The Midwest communities our Members represent are home to people who make, build, and grow that which makes, builds, and grows America.

For decades, however, our region has borne the brunt of job losses associated with disastrous trade policies, underinvestment, and deindustrialization.

Since the passage of NAFTA in 1993, China's entrance into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and CAFTA's passage in 2005, over 91,000 factories have closed across our country.

Nearly 5 million good-paying jobs have been lost, and our region has been very hard hit and is clawing its way back.

But our workers and their families in Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York, in the Great Lakes watershed have suffered enormously as middle class jobs evaporated.

The tragedy does not end there. Local governments have been left to scramble as declining revenues led to the collapse of their budgets and the accrual of crushing bonded indebtedness.

The size and scope of these accumulated economic challenges are too much for any one city or county or, indeed, State to overcome alone. Places like Toledo, Ohio, Lorain, Detroit, Buffalo, Flint, Rochester, all the towns along the old Erie Canal struggle to recover from the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to penny-wage countries.

Chicago, Cleveland, and Erie, Pennsylvania, alone are limited in their ability to halt climate change and reverse its increasing effects on their shorelines and neighborhoods.

The Great Lakes region needs a boost through accelerated investments and strategic and coordinated support to get back on track.

Last year, President Biden and congressional Democrats accomplished what many had tried but failed to do, and that is pass an historic investment in jobs and infrastructure. That is step one.

This support will help empower our communities to begin planning the necessary steps to rebuilding roads and bridges, improve ports, rail lines and airports, modernize energy and water infrastructure, and protect all of our lakes, the freshwater kingdom on this continent.

But to maximize the impact and turbocharge revitalization, our region really needs a strategic plan to coordinate these resources along, importantly, with private investment to reboot our future.

The Great Lakes region is the only major economic region in our country that lacks a Federal entity dedicated to supporting its long- term coordinated economic development and conserving its natural environment.

The West's water is served by the Bureau of Reclamation, or if you look at the Delta Regional Authority, it helps 10 million people in the Delta Region. And more than 400 counties from Mississippi to West Virginia are served by the Appalachian Regional Commission.

The Great Lakes deserves no less. The Great Lakes Authority Act is long overdue and will create an instrumentality to serve the Great Lakes fresh watershed which will become even more important in the decades to come with each passing day.

The Great Lakes Authority will be a Federal/State instrumentality like the others to spur job creation and world-class worker education, training, and adjustment in communities left behind.

It will foster innovation to build forward the struggling core U.S. manufacturing and industrial base. And it will promote new advances in renewable energy technologies like solar, wind and hydrogen while conserving and stewarding our precious environmental assets.

It will allow us an efficient multi-modal transportation shared network with our closest neighbor, Canada, that connects people and goods with where they need to go. Indeed, Canada is our largest trading partner.

For America to compete in this century, we simply need a Great Lakes Authority, and I urge my colleagues to join us in this important effort. Please help us help the Great Lakes region.

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