Peter Visclosky: “I also want to add my voice to the chair's in opposition to the gentleman's amendment. We just had a colloquy on the…”

“I also want to add my voice to the chair's in opposition to the gentleman's amendment. We just had a colloquy on the House floor with several Members from the State of Pennsylvania relative to the fate of 230 lock chambers on our inland waterways that carry hundreds of millions of tons of cargo. If they fail, we would need, as has already been mentioned this morning, 24 million additional trucks, which would cost billions more in fuel and generate millions of tons of pollution. These locks that are the backbone of this Nation's inland waterway system were built with a 50-year design life. Many of those that exist in western Pennsylvania are now over a hundred years old. Relative to cuts, I want to emphasize to our colleagues that there was a lot of work that the chairman, the members of this subcommittee, and the staffs put into this bill to make very discreet, discerning decisions, and in many instances, to make cuts. I would take simply one program as an example: environmental cleanup. We have, again, a national responsibility to clean up these legacies of the Cold War for the health and safety of 300 million people. But we made discreet decisions. For defense environmental site-by-site decisions, for example, on the Office of River Protection in the State of Washington, we are $30 million below last year's level. For the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the State of Tennessee, we're $20 million below last year's level.…”