On the recordMay 7, 2013
I want to mention a couple of things. First of all, the Senator from Arkansas and I have a very significant amendment, and one we will want to talk about. In fact, it is an amendment we had during the discussion on the amendments for the budget bill at something like 4 o'clock in the morning. At that time we were able to get it passed without a dissenting vote, so it is one we should be able to get through. I will yield to the Senator from Arkansas in a moment, but before doing that I want to mention we have a set-aside amendment I am very concerned with. I certainly think the Senator in the Chair, as well as the Senator from Arkansas will both be very appreciative of this and supportive of it since they have a lot of small communities in their States, as I do in my State of Oklahoma. It uses the threshold of 25,000 people--any community that has 25,000 people or less--in order to take advantage of this set-aside money that would come within the WRDA bill. Now, here is the problem we have. A lot of the small communities in my State of Oklahoma--and I would suggest the States of West Virginia and Arkansas are in the same situation--are not large enough to have an engineer or someone who is going to be able to put grants together. So we take 10 percent of the total amount and put it in there as a set- aside for these small communities. This is a formula we have used before.…
