Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2273, Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. GARAMENDI. I thank my friend from Massachusetts.

I don't understand. This is a very, very important issue. This is an issue about dealing with fly ash and how we're going to contain it and process it and protect the citizens. It's also an opportunity for us to deal with one of the fundamental economic problems we have in the United States, which is the loss of manufacturing. There's going to be a lot of different kinds of equipment, material, steel, cement, other kinds of materials that are going to be part of the process that this bill calls for, that is, adequately dealing with fly ash. Why wouldn't you want to put into this piece of legislation that those materials, those pieces of equipment, be manufactured in the United States?

We need to rebuild our manufacturing base in this Nation. We've lost more than 50 percent of it over the last 25 years. We need to once again make it in America. And I tell you, you put this amendment into this bill and we'll see one more piece of American manufacturing coming back into place. It actually works.

In the Recovery Act, which you like to call the stimulus bill, there was a paragraph put in that says if you're going to use the transportation funds in this bill, then you must buy equipment made in America. In Sacramento, California, Siemens has built and is continuing to expand a manufacturing plant because of that provision. Hundreds of people in California are employed because Congress wrote into the bill money spent on trains and buses and light rail will have to be spent on equipment manufactured in America. So Siemens is doing it.

Write into this piece of legislation, and there will be new manufacturing plants in America making the equipment to deal with the fly ash. It is eminently sensible, so why be unsensible? Why block this amendment?

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