[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 80 (Wednesday, May 16, 2018)]
[House]
[Page H3990]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE WEEK

  (Mr. LaMALFA asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, in addition to National Police Week, it is 
also National Infrastructure Week.
  Currently, much of our Nation's infrastructure is in disrepair. 
Dilapidated roads, crumbling bridges, and battered levees and dams 
litter the country from coast to coast.
  In large rural areas like my district in northern California, the 
infrastructure gap is even more exaggerated, where funding is even more 
difficult to come by, as it is in all rural areas of the U.S. We have 
to stretch every dollar as far as possible. It is not enough to simply 
put more money into the system, but to make those dollars more 
effective.
  Currently, local counties must jump through multiple, duplicative 
regulatory hoops from both the State and Federal Government. That only 
wastes time and money, and it makes no sense.
  We have seen that local agencies have proven to be far more effective 
than their Federal counterparts. That is why we have to streamline the 
permitting process to allow States more authority to conduct 
environmental reviews on their own and reduce the regulatory burden.
  The President's MOU to have ``one Federal decision'' policy, one-stop 
shopping, and, indeed, one lead agency will streamline that vastly and 
help us get our highways done and our levee projects, multiple things 
that need to be done to make us safer and more economically sound--
basic bipartisan reforms that will make sense for the American people 
in a timely manner.

                          ____________________