Kendrick Meek: “I am very grateful and privileged to rise in strong support of the Water Resources Development Act, in particular the…”

“I am very grateful and privileged to rise in strong support of the Water Resources Development Act, in particular the section on the Everglades. Those of us in Florida, and those of us throughout this country who cherish what we have in natural resources, we owe a debt of gratitude to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Shuster) and the ranking member, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Oberstar), for their hard and diligent work in bringing this important legislation to the floor and their strong support for Everglades restoration. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Shaw), my chairman, has inspired each member of the delegation to see the worth of this project and we are very happy that the Congress has seen fit to include the Everglades in their plans. Mr. Speaker, the Everglades are dying and all of us know that we must act now. We lose what is left of the Everglades within a year. We have a lot of people to be thankful for it that worked on this, that we have heard about this morning, including the administration, the State of Florida administration, Senators Graham and Smith and others, and all of the environmental community throughout this country. We owe a great deal to the late Marjorie Stoneham Douglas as she mentioned the Everglades as a 'river of grass,' and now we have sought to have it the way Marjorie would have liked it to be with water. No one disputes that the Federal Government was pretty much responsible for what has happened in the Everglades.”