Collin Peterson: “Mr. Chairman, as I said earlier, I represent an area that has a lot of wetlands, and I have been involved with this…”

“Mr. Chairman, as I said earlier, I represent an area that has a lot of wetlands, and I have been involved with this issue all of my political career in the State legislature, and now since I have been in Congress to some extent, and I think people ought to read what is in this bill. The gentleman says they have 75 percent of what is in the Shuster bill, but you have to look at what the content is and realize some of things that have been left out. First of all, there is no risk assessment at all in this bill, No. 1. No. 2, in the wetlands area, you know in our country we have been trying to simplify this process. What is driving people crazy is they have got to go to all of these agencies and they overrule each other and they do not talk to each other and they do not agree on things, and cause an untold amount of problems for my constituents. What this bill is going to do if you take it out and read it, it is going to create a new wetlands coordinating commission that is going to be appointed by the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, which we have been trying to get out of this process because frankly they do not belong in the process in the farm country, and they are going to create a coordinating committee that is going to have 18 Federal agencies trying to coordinate some kind of wetlands policy.”