Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I offer this amendment in defense of agricultural producers across the country who continue to face the heavy hand of EPA regulations. The EPA's Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure rule for on- farm fuel storage requires farmers and ranchers to make costly infrastructure improvements to their oil storage facilities to reduce the possibility of an oil spill. These regulations fail to take into account, however, the relative risk of oil spills on farms, and they do not recognize the simple fact that family farmers are already careful stewards of the land and water. It is clear that no one has more at stake in the health of their land than those who work on the ground from which they derive their livelihoods. Even if EPA wants to resist common sense, USDA actually studied risk of oil spills on farms. It determined that more than 99 percent of farmers have never experienced a spill. In the 2014 Water Resources Development Act, we made modifications to the exemption threshold and required EPA to go back to the drawing board and conduct a study to determine how to balance the needs of financial resources of small producers with their assessed spill risk. Instead, the EPA defied Congress' wishes and hastily put together a study without evaluating risk specific to agriculture. It offered the same unsubstantiated conclusions that it found in the original SPCC rule and could not cite a single incident of a spill on a farm. Mr.…”