Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCALISE. Mr. Chairman, I rise to present an amendment that is a bipartisan amendment that has passed for the last 2 years that this bill has come before the House.

What this deals with is a change in process for mitigation methods that the Corps of Engineers implemented back in 2011 called the Modified Charleston Method. And when they implemented this new method of mitigation, it basically started making a lot of projects--surely in southeast Louisiana--unworkable, including, Mr. Chairman, flood protection projects.

One of the things we have seen is that it actually has increased the cost of flood protection projects along the coast by over 300 percent, which in many cases has made those flood protection projects unaffordable for local governments to be able to afford for themselves, where they are putting up their own money. It is not even Federal money.

And here comes the Federal Government, putting in an unworkable plan that makes it cost-prohibitive to actually implement flood protection. And, of course, we have seen at the Federal level what happens if you don't have that kind of protection. We sure don't want to be in a position where we are stopping local communities from being able to protect themselves against flood with their own money.

What is even more ironic about this, Mr. Chairman, is that the Corps of Engineers, while they have imposed this on local governments and private business, they have exempted themselves from it. The Corps of Engineers doesn't even use this method that they have imposed on everybody else--I am sure because they recognize it would be unworkable for them. But they impose it on everybody else. That is not the way we should do business, Mr. Chairman.

What this amendment says is that no funds can be expended to implement that unworkable method. Let's get back to the normal way of doing mitigation, which was practical, which was the way most other places in the country do it.

I would like to submit for the Record a letter from my colleague from Louisiana, Cedric Richmond, who is also in strong support and is the lead cosponsor of this amendment.

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