Claudia Tenney: “I join my colleagues today urging commonsense policies to carry out the goals of the Endangered Species Act while…”

“I join my colleagues today urging commonsense policies to carry out the goals of the Endangered Species Act while allowing our communities to flourish. As stewards of our planet, we each have a responsibility to care for the environment and protect our wildlife while also caring for and addressing the needs of our human environment, which often gets left out in this conversation. However, today it seems more difficult than ever to have balanced discussions. Deeply entrenched special interests are increasingly using our small communities as pawns for their larger political ambitions. Unfortunately, the bureaucrats in both the Federal and State Government, especially in New York, have become more powerful than the people, and that is unacceptable. I want to bring to your attention what is happening in my community today. I represent New York's 22nd District, which stretches all the way from Lake Ontario, yes, a Great Lake, to the Pennsylvania border in the heart of beautiful, pastoral, upstate New York. On April 16, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation ordered an immediate halting of a routine annual dredging project to clear ingress and egress into the lovely inlet of Sandy Pond, which is on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario, due to the sighting of a piping plover, a small shoreline bird that weighs less than 2 ounces.…”