After suffering a two-week delay caused by the federal government shutdown, the “Water Resources Reform and Development Act” (WRRDA) was being prepped for debate in the House of Representatives during the week of October 21. Should the bill pass the House as expected, members of the House and Senate could soon begin conference committee negotiations to hammer out a final water resources bill that could include an AMWA-backed WIFIA pilot program.
Introduced as H.R. 3080, the House WRRDA bill would authorize U.S. Army Corps of Engineers activities to maintain and upgrade the nation’s water resource infrastructure (such as ports, canals, harbors, and waterways) while also implementing a series of reforms intended to cut bureaucratic red tape that delay project approvals for years. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee unanimously approved the bill in September, and it was first scheduled for a full House vote during the week of October 7 – until the government shutdown debate pushed it off the agenda.
The U.S. Senate approved a similar water resources bill (S. 601) earlier this year, but one item from that bill missing from the House version is a “Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act” (WIFIA) pilot program that would offer competitive low-interest financing to water and wastewater utilities undertaking infrastructure projects expected to cost more than $20 million. While WIFIA has support among House members, House leaders made a tactical decision to omit the program from H.R. 3080 in order to keep the overall bill as narrowly focused as possible. Including an additional pilot program, it was feared, could have drawn opposition from small-government conservatives that might have derailed the entire bill.
Instead, the fate of WIFIA will be decided by the House-Senate conference committee that will meet to negotiate a final water resources bill – possibly before the end of the year. WIFIA’s place in the final bill is not assured, but support for the program from Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and House Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Bob Gibbs (R-Oh.) should put it in a strong position.
AMWA, along with the American Water Works Association and the Water Environment Federation, have spent recent months working to build congressional support for WIFIA, and these efforts will continue as conference committee members are named and the final water resources bill begins to take shape. The association will ask its members to contact their lawmakers in support of WIFIA during this time as well.
H.R. 3080 does include a nonbinding “sense of the Congress” provision encouraging states involved in cross-border water rights disputes to resolve their differences through interstate water agreements. The language stems from disputes involving allocations from the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River System and the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa River System in the Southeast, and resembles a similar nonbinding provision senators approved as part of S. 601.