Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015

Floor Speech

Ms. CASTOR of Florida. Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank Chairman Culberson and Ranking Member Bishop for all of their hard work and the committee, all of your work on behalf of America's servicemembers and veterans to ensure that they have the military facilities that they deserve.

I am very heartened to see the Congress, on both sides of the aisle, working together to ensure that our military families and servicemembers and our veterans have every resource they need to be successful.

My amendment proposes to transfer $9.8 million to the Air Force construction account from the BRAC account to really highlight an area in military construction and our facilities that needs a little bit of extra attention because I think we can all agree that it is important to ensure that, after our servicemembers serve in hazardous areas across the globe, when they return to the United States and our military installations, that those installations are clean and safe and secure as well.

Mr. Chairman, I have the privilege of representing MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. MacDill is led by the 6th Air Mobility Wing, but has a host of very important tenants on the base, including United States Central Command, United States Special Operations Command, the 927th Air Refueling Wing, and the Joint Communication Support Element. In fact, at MacDill, we have 39 mission support partners, so it is a very busy base.

I wanted to bring to everyone's attention a deficiency in our mission support facility. Think about this big active base with all of these tenants, 13,000 military and civilian personnel at MacDill. Add on to that 170,000 military retirees in the area.

They all come to the mission support facility to get credentialed and to take care of the very most basic credentialling and security processes at the base.

Our mission support facility is far from the main gate. It is way too small, but most seriously, it contains black mold. It is on the first floor along the walls.

Tampa, of course, is a very damp place, a very humid place, and if you don't take care and maintain these facilities, it causes very expensive problems down the road. They are doing the best they can, but it is very difficult to keep up.

I raise this issue because this has occurred at other military installations before, with the black mold. There was Hampton Roads in Virginia, in military housing and, most notoriously, the Walter Reed building 18, where we had wounded soldiers.

Now, thankfully, through the efforts of the Congress, many of these have been dealt with, but I think it is very important that the Air Force maintain a critical eye on these establishments, to make sure that they are up to standard for our military families.

So I wanted to raise awareness of this matter to the Air Force, to the committee members, and I do hope that you all will work with me to address this critical issue at MacDill Air Force Base and other substandard military facilities across America.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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