Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TONKO. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, our waterways and our waters are precious resources, and we need to advance policies that protect that precious resource and certainly need policies that enable us to be resourceful in the use of this commodity.

In my youth, growing up in my home and hometown of Amsterdam, New York, if you wanted to know what color the Mohawk Carpet Mills were dying their carpets that day, all you had to do was look at the flow of the Chuctanunda Creek as it emptied into the Mohawk River.

With the passage of the Clean Water Act, Congress took historic action to protect public health and improve the quality of drinking water across our great country.

Our rivers, our brooks, and our streams are the center of our communities, and we have come so far to protect and strengthen these resources for the generations that will follow.

Instead of strengthening our waterways, this bill that we are debating today on the House floor is a wholesale attack on what is left of the Clean Water Act. It is a one-two punch that would allow more forever chemicals and harmful pollutants to be discharged into our waterways with little regulation, while diluting the ability for States and Tribes to take action to protect their communities.

I continue to believe that there is a genuine interest in Congress on both sides of the aisle to advance durable, bipartisan solutions to meet our Nation's energy demands, to create good jobs, and to safeguard our communities and environment.

Mr. Chair, I encourage my Republican colleagues to focus on real solutions instead of giveaways to polluters. This special interest crowd that is getting different treatment to pollute and not respect our resources has got to stop.

Mr. Chair, I urge Members to please oppose this bill.

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