George Miller: “what happened was the local levee agency, the local flood control agency kept coming back to the Corps and making…”

“what happened was the local levee agency, the local flood control agency kept coming back to the Corps and making additions to the levees. Change orders. Those of us who know about military expenditures know the cost goes up because of change orders. They kept changing the design, and in this case the levee. The costs kept going up. They had to come back through budget cycles to get the money. Then the person who lost an open bid to do the work sued, saying the process was illegal, held the bid up and delayed the project. Had nothing to do with the Fish and Wildlife Service and ESA. The fact is they signed off on all these changes on all these projects. So we can scapegoat the ESA, and people can come down here, and we saw a little while ago in the well, and we can rail against the slugs and bugs and we can rail against the ESA. I would suggest that, for the most part, that is the genesis of this bill. If we look at the people who are supporting this legislation, they are the same people that supported this legislation in our committee, if the gentleman will remember, that basically just gutted the Endangered Species. They said we can save the species but we could not save the habitat. Hello? Where are the species supposed to go? So we have the same coalition. We can rail against it and feel good, and we can try to tell our constituents that this levee failed and that levee failed because of the Endangered Species.”