Chesapeake Bay Gateways and Watertrails Network Continuing Authorization Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Speaker, let me begin by commending my colleague from Maryland (Mr. Sarbanes) for taking the initiative on this important piece of legislation and for all his leadership in our effort to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and to Mr. Wittman for joining him in this bipartisan effort.

Before I say a few words about this bill, I do think it's important to point out that this body has now passed numerous pieces of legislation to try to address the energy crisis and the rise in gas prices around this country, including legislation to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by diversifying our energy portfolio. One of the things we passed out of this body to do that was to say we shouldn't be giving taxpayer subsidies, giveaways, to the oil and gas industry at a time when they're already making record profits and Americans are facing record prices at the pump. We should instead be using those resources to invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency. That's the direction this country needs to go.

The President was in Saudi Arabia recently having tea with the leaders of the Saudi Royal Family asking them to reduce prices. They said no. We need a long-term strategy. We passed that out of this House, and, unfortunately, the President said he's going to veto it because he wants to keep giving those subsidies to the oil and gas industry rather than taking a new and different approach to our energy crisis. That's what this House did. Unfortunately, the President continues to block those efforts.

Now, we do need, as a country, to protect our beautiful and vital natural resources like the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay, as my colleague Mr. Sarbanes has pointed out, is the Nation's largest estuary. It is a national treasure; it's a natural treasure. And that's what this bill is about because the Chesapeake Bay is currently under assault from a whole host of sources of pollution. Point sources of pollution like the kind of pollution that comes out of a sewage pipe when it's not being adequately treated before it gets into the tributaries, like the Potomac River, the Anacostia River, the Susquehanna River; and nonpoint sources of pollution, the kind of pollution that washes off our driveways from oil dripping from cars or the pollution that comes off of fields that are under agricultural production.

Now, not long ago we passed in this legislature, in this Congress, the farm bill, and that farm bill provided vital additional help to our farmers, who are good stewards of our land. It provided them with vital new tools to help prevent that kind of nonpoint source pollution. And that will give them a vital boost in the years ahead in our effort to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and meet the goals that have been set.

But the other key element to sustain that support is to engage the public. And we mean not just the Department of Agriculture but the other departments and agencies of the United States Government like the Department of Interior and the National Park Service, who has played such an important role in raising the understanding of the public that we all need to be part of this effort to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.

In our State of Maryland, when you go down your roads and you see the systems where the water dumps into the pipes to take it out to rivers, it says this drains into the Chesapeake Bay. We have done a good job of trying to raise that public support. But this system, this whole effort, the Gateways effort that we are talking about in this bill, has also been a vital component of that to let people know what the Chesapeake Bay means to our region and to our country.

And it would be very shortsighted to end this program. What we need to do instead is to say, as has been said by others, that this program has worked in raising that public awareness, enlisting the support of students and adults, young children and senior citizens in this big effort to protect this vital estuary. And this Gateways program has been a very important component in that effort. We need to keep it going, and we need to make it permanent.

I salute my colleague from Maryland, JOHN SARBANES, for his tremendous effort in this region and for reaching out and making this a bipartisan effort along with Mr. Wittman, and I urge adoption of this legislation.

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