John Garamendi: “Your comment about Chesapeake Bay brought back memories. In the mid-1990s, I was Deputy Secretary at the Department of…”

“Your comment about Chesapeake Bay brought back memories. In the mid-1990s, I was Deputy Secretary at the Department of the Interior during the Clinton period, and during that time there was a major effort under way, What are we going to do about Chesapeake Bay? How do we save the bay because of the enormous decline in crab fishing and the shellfish and other very, very important environment, but also economic assets that were in Chesapeake Bay. Now, you and your colleagues are carrying this thing a step forward using the programs to generate new ways of keeping water that flows in the bay, or cleaning water that flows into the bay. I want one of those centers of excellence in my district. I represent the delta of California, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and this is an enormous environmental problem. The fish are declining, fisheries, invasive species. We know clearly that the contamination from various sources is a problem. So maybe we can get one of those centers of excellence in California also. But what's at stake here is the knowledge necessary to solve our environmental problems and, simultaneously, from that knowledge will come the new technologies and the new jobs which will be useful, not only in Chesapeake Bay or the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, but we can then export that.”