Political Quotes

“I have an amendment at the desk that will help stop Congress from taking the Corps of Engineers back to the 1980s. In 2007, Congress passed legislation requiring the Army Corps of Engineers to update its principles and guidelines, the P&G. These are used by the Corps in formulating, evaluating, and implementing water resource projects. This is something I've been involved with since I first came to Congress 17 years ago. I served on the Water Resources Subcommittee, and discovered that the Corps was trapped in time. This update was critical in that these have not been updated since 1983. If you understand how the Federal Government operates, for something that was approved in 1983, they were probably in the works in the early seventies. Earlier this year, the Council on Environmental Quality finally released an updated P&G that lays out broad principles to guide water investment as well as draft interagency guidelines for implementing the principles and requirements. These new P&G were developed over the last 6 years by Federal agencies and they incorporated extensive comments from the public, as well as the National Academy of Sciences. The modernized P&G will help accelerate project approval, reduce costs, and support water infrastructure projects with the greatest economic and community benefits.…”