Federal Coastal Storm Risk Management Projects

Floor Speech

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, the Coastal Barrier Resources Act, or CBRA as we call it, is a great example of successful Federal land management. When President Reagan signed it in 1982, he explained that without this statute, the Federal Government would be subsidizing development in risky areas and would subsequently be on the hook for disaster costs when storms inevitably hit these vulnerable regions.

He said that CBRA would ``halt the Federal subsidy spiral,'' by discouraging Federal investments in development on storm-prone coastal lands, lands that, if developed, would put human lives and property at risk, and also cost taxpayers billions of dollars in disaster relief.

In the years since this law was enacted, the U.S. taxpayer has saved over $9.5 billion in disaster costs alone and the act has protected millions of acres of habitat.

Mr. Speaker, I will hand it to President Reagan. Signing this bill into law was actually in line with conservative conservation, mainly because CBRA was and is the type of innovative policy we need to conserve habitat and make our coastlines more resilient to climate change, all while saving American taxpayers money.

I thank Mr. Rouzer for working with Democrats to produce a bill that we can all support today. As the bill was originally introduced, it would have amended CBRA to allow taxpayer dollars to subsidize taking sand from CBRA units for beach renourishment at a handful of beaches outside the CBRA system.

Without careful limits, this practice can be destructive to fish and wildlife habitat. It can also cause more erosion for communities downdrift of the sand borrow site.

I said during our hearing and our markup on this bill that if we are going to grant an exception to CBRA like this, we need to be careful. We need to ensure that it is in the spirit of CBRA, meaning that we need to first protect habitat and coastal barriers and not let Federal subsidies spiral into a cascade of more and more Federal subsidies in these areas.

Democrats raised this concern during committee consideration, and I thank Mr. Rouzer and my other colleagues across the aisle for working with us and finding a bipartisan solution.

This amended version of the bill that we are voting on today would instead provide that, in the case of a federally declared disaster and with careful environmental analysis, a narrow exemption can be granted for using a CBRA unit as a borrow site for towns in a state of emergency.

With this clarifying language, I am pleased to support the solution and the revised bill. I do also hope that this bill's passage in the House will help build some momentum for the broader CBRA package that Representatives Kiggans and Blunt Rochester, as well as Senators Carper and Graham and others have been negotiating.

We need responsible, equitable, science-based management of public lands and taxpayer dollars, and I think this updated version of H.R. 524, in combination with that broader CBRA package, would achieve that objective by addressing the issues at hand and protecting the integrity of the CBRA system.

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on the bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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