Norvell Emerson: “the eastern border of my district has 200 miles of Mississippi River frontage. I can tell my colleagues that when the…”

“the eastern border of my district has 200 miles of Mississippi River frontage. I can tell my colleagues that when the Mississippi River floods, the wildlife head to our levees. If we are going to talk about truly protecting wildlife, then I think the best way to do that is to have a levee that is structurally sound, well-maintained and able to withstand the extraordinary floods that we have had in the past few years. Our levee boards, our drainage districts that work on a daily basis to maintain these levees, who touch and see and feel and who actually have some experience with the levees, oppose the Boehlert amendment and support H.R. 478. These folks have to face the daily threat of the Department of Interior and the EPA swooping down on them because they disturbed wildlife while doing some sort of general maintenance work, all in the name of endangered species. If we cannot do preventative maintenance, then the levees fail and we do not protect anything. As a matter of fact, our Department of Conservation every 2 years has to spend $1 million to put the wildlife habitat back together. If the levees were intact, that would not be the case. That is just taxpayer dollars. If we cannot do preventative maintenance, the levees will fail, we will not protect anything, we will not save the communities, the people in those communities or the birds, the fish and the beetles. We have to be able to perform maintenance that prevents levee failures.”