[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 131 (Thursday, August 1, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5292-S5294]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            ECONOMIC GROWTH

  Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, we just had our last vote here in the 
Senate before going into the August recess, and I am looking forward to 
being home in Ohio during the week. I come here during the week and go 
home on the weekends, but during this August recess period, it gives me 
a chance to get all around the State because we are home during the 
workweek.
  I will be in a few dozen counties by the end of the recess, but I am 
going to start by being at the Ohio State Fair tomorrow. Tomorrow 
morning at 7:30 a.m., we have the biggest ag event in the State, which 
is our annual ag breakfast. I will be hearing from farmers from all 
over the State.
  It has been a tough year for us in Ohio. Because of all the water, we 
have had lots of farmers who weren't able to plant their crops, and, 
therefore, there are some fields that are bare. Others who did plant 
their crops have found that their crops aren't doing very well because 
of all of the water damage early in the year.
  So it has been a hard year, and, frankly, it has been a hard few 
years in terms of the price, particularly, of corn and soybeans. On top 
of that, we have less exports of soybeans, which I hope is now being 
addressed with the new agreements being made with relation to China in 
particular, but that has put pressure on price, because without having 
those additional overseas markets, it has had the effect of lowering 
the price, particularly for soybeans and corn. On top of that, it has 
just been generally a tough time in farm country in terms of the price 
of inputs going up and the price of the product being flat.
  So my hope is that tomorrow I will get more input from farmers all 
across the State, and we will be able to continue to talk about the 
things we are doing.
  I supported the U.S. Department of Agriculture providing some 
emergency loans and grants to Ohio farmers to get us through this 
season to avoid bankruptcies and to get people back on their feet. That 
money is now beginning to flow, I am happy to say. We are beginning to 
see some progress. The new farm bill is helping.
  So my hope is that we will see better weather here going into the end 
of the season for these crops, that the harvest season will be better, 
and that we will be able to get back on our feet.
  Also tomorrow, after touring the fair, I will be having some meetings 
with the business community, talking about what is working and what is 
not working in terms of regulations and taxes.
  I will also be meeting with business leadership about how to get 
these new opportunity zones in the tax bill up and going. At those 
meetings, we will have community leaders and we will have people from 
neighborhoods that have had a tough time. Even during the economic 
growth, we have seen that some neighborhoods have been left behind. 
They still have relatively high unemployment, and they still have real 
problems of stubborn poverty. These opportunity zones are a perfect 
example there. This actually puts money into these communities by 
lowering and sometimes removing altogether the capital gains taxes for 
people if they agree to invest.
  I will be talking to small businesses and housing advocates who are 
excited about this and see how this is working in Columbus, OH.
  I will also be in Youngstown, OH, early next week, talking about this 
same topic, as well as some other economic development issues we have 
there in terms of how we deal with the Lordstown plant, the plant that 
General Motors, unfortunately, has chosen to walk away from, which is 
very discouraging.
  So we will be all over the State.
  On Saturday, I will be at the largest gathering in the country of 
watercraft, which is the annual Paddlefest, with more kayaks and canoes 
on the Ohio River than any other event in the country. I will be 
participating in a charity race--I think this is an 11-mile race this 
year--with my son, going down the Ohio River, all for a good cause. I 
look forward to that as well.
  I will be all over the State. It is an opportunity to visit the 
State, talk to constituents, hear what is going on, and try to be more 
helpful here in Washington to address the real concerns we have in 
Ohio.
  One of the things I will be doing next weekend is visiting the 
Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I will be touring the park, looking at 
what some of their maintenance needs are, and talking to the Park 
Rangers.
  Cuyahoga Valley National Park is actually the 13th most visited 
national park in America. You probably haven't heard of it, unless you 
are from Ohio. But if you are from Akron or Cleveland, you certainly 
know about it because it is nestled right in between these two big 
cities, and it gets a lot of visitors and a lot of school kids. It is 
an incredible park because it is really a suburban and urban, as well 
as rural, park all at once. There is a lot of outdoor education going 
on there. There is a beautiful river that runs through it, the Cuyahoga 
River. There is also a train that can commute you back and forth. I 
will be there with Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, doing a kayak 
trip down the river, again looking at some of the needs the park has.
  This leads me to a topic I had hoped to discuss on the floor 
yesterday, but because of a string of votes we were unable to do so. I 
was going to be out here on the floor giving a colloquy with some of my 
colleagues--Senator Alexander, Senator Warner, Senator King, and 
others. We were going to talk about the need for us to provide more 
repairs in our national parks.
  Unfortunately, Cuyahoga Valley National Park is one of those parks 
badly in need of it. We have about a $48 million maintenance backlog. 
What does that mean? It means that every year we do fund the parks, but 
we don't fund these capital expenses that are needed. In the case of 
Cuyahoga Valley, as an example, there is an old railroad bridge they 
use for pedestrian traffic that is falling apart, and they may have to 
close it off soon. For every year that you don't attend to this 
deferred maintenance, things get worse and worse. Think about your own 
home. If you stop taking care of the roof, what happens? You get a 
leak, and then you have drywall damage. Then, you have paint damage. So 
the Federal Government over time has not taken care of

[[Page S5293]]

the parks and not provided the right stewardship in terms of these 
longer term deferred maintenance projects. Yes, we fund the naturalist 
programs and we fund the immediate needs of the park, but these, 
frankly, more expensive items, like deferred maintenance, do not get 
funded. My hope is that we will pass legislation to do that.
  For more than a century, we have been blessed as Americans to have 
these National Parks. They are amazing. Some of you have experienced 
the majesty of the Yellowstones, Yosemites, and Grand Tetons of the 
world. They are amazing. There are some more modest ones, like the 
boyhood home of William Howard Taft in Ohio, that maybe you don't know 
as well, but they are all important. A lot of them are focused on 
history, in terms of the historic homes. There are now 84 million acres 
of national parks and historical sites. They attract over 330 million 
visitors every year. Think about that. That is more than the population 
of our country.
  Again, we have eight of those parks in Ohio. We are proud of those. 
And 2.7 million visitors go to Ohio's National Parks every year. They 
are part of our history and part of our culture. This $12 billion 
backlog of long-delayed maintenance needs is a real concern, though. It 
is $12 billion now. These parks are treasures, but they have 
unfortunately been allowed to deteriorate to the point that some of the 
assets in these parks are totally unusable.
  If you go to a park today, you might find out that a trail is closed 
or a visitors center can't be visited. We have a visitors center in 
Ohio that had to be closed down because the roof was leaking. They 
didn't have the funds to replace the roof. They had funds to run the 
programs within the visitors center, but these long-term maintenance 
problems are a real problem. You may find that some of the overnight 
lodging facilities are not available.
  In a way, our parks are crumbling from within. They may look good on 
the outside, but they have serious problems.
  I mentioned the fact that we have long-term maintenance problems at 
Cuyahoga Valley National Park. We also have that at others, to the 
point of about $100 million in backlogs.
  Last August, I visited Perry's Victory and International Peace 
Memorial on the shores of Lake Erie, which was established on Lake Erie 
to honor those who fought in the famous Battle of Lake Erie during the 
war of 1812, as well as to celebrate the now longstanding peace we have 
had between Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. There, I saw 
$48 million in long-delayed maintenance needs at the site, primarily a 
seawall. There is a seawall on Lake Erie to keep Lake Erie from 
destroying the park, and it is cracking. There are actually sinkholes 
around it. So you can't walk near the seawall for fear of falling into 
a sinkhole. This is something that needs attention, and it needs it 
now. Yet think of the expense of replacing a huge seawall, about a $48 
billion project, when you add to that the need to make the visitors 
center accessible under the ADA, or the Americans with Disabilities 
Act. That is an example.
  I mentioned President Taft's first place. The house was in pretty 
good condition, and, unfortunately, it now has some problems. It has 
roofing problems, and about $2 million worth of repairs are necessary 
and needed there.
  I also visited Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in 
Chillicothe. There you see millennia-old burial sites from pre-
Columbian times. Again, there are about $3.5 million in unmet 
maintenance needs at the site, including repairs to the exterior of the 
visitors center that was absolutely needed. You can see why when you go 
there, because there are construction signs in front of it. You can go 
in the Visitors Center, but pretty soon you will not be able to at all.
  Our parks have had a lot of issues that have built up over time. This 
deferred maintenance is really important. So we have legislation to 
address that. It is important that we do it now because if we don't, 
the costs just go higher. For taxpayers, it is a good deal to move now 
to make these improvements so that the costs don't compound and you 
make the situation even worse.
  This is at a time when more and more people want to go to our parks. 
Visitation over the last 10 years has increased by about 58 million 
people. That is putting a lot of pressure on the parks, of course. But 
it is good that people want to go to our parks. Our national treasures 
are a great place to go with your family, but we can't keep the parks 
healthy through bandaids alone. We need this legislation.
  Along with my colleagues Senators Mark Warner, Lamar Alexander, and 
Angus King, about whom I spoke earlier--two Republicans, one Democrat, 
and one Independent--we have proposed what is called the Restore Our 
Parks Act. It is a commonsense solution.
  Specifically, the legislation creates what is called a legacy 
restoration fund, which will get half of all the annual energy revenues 
over the next 5 years that are not otherwise allocated to be used for 
these priority deferred maintenance projects. This money would come 
from royalties from our offshore and onshore energy projects.

  By the way, the Trump administration is doing more energy exploration 
and development. So there is actually more funding coming out of here. 
The funding and the royalty would go to this purpose to the extent it 
is not being used for other purposes. The bill caps deposits into the 
fund at $1.3 billion annually, which would provide a total of $6.5 
billion for deferred maintenance over the next 5 years.
  You might notice that $6.5 is not the $12 billion we need, but, No. 
1, it is a great start. No. 2, we have asked the Park Service to give 
us a specific list of what are the most urgent problems, and that is 
about $6.5 billion. We will continue to work on this, but right now we 
need that funding badly because, again, if we don't provide it, not 
only will the parks not be there for people to enjoy, with certain 
assets off limits, but also the costs only get higher and higher. It is 
a historic step in the right direction.
  Last Congress, we proposed this legislation and we got a lot of 
support. We had a total of 40 cosponsors here in the Senate, more than 
one-third of this Chamber. There was a House bill also offered, 
companion legislation in the House, that actually got 302 Members 
supporting it. So these are totally bipartisan approaches. That is two-
thirds of the House of Representatives.
  We also got it through our committee here in the Senate last year. 
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed a bill on a 
bipartisan basis by a vote of 19 to 4.
  Importantly, we also received support from all over the country. As 
people found out about this legislation, people who love the parks 
stepped forward. It includes the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National 
Parks Conservation Association, the Outdoor Industry Alliance, the 
National Trust for Public Land, and others. During the legislation 
hearing last year, the director of the Pew Charitable Trusts agreed, 
saying: ``Supporting this bipartisan bill is a wise investment for our 
National Parks System and has overwhelming support from the American 
public, generates hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars 
for the economy each year and provides access to world class recreation 
opportunities and helps preserve our nation's history.'' That is all 
true.
  This is a critical piece of legislation that we can actually all 
agree on here on a bipartisan basis. We urge that it be moved quickly.
  As we enter the August recess, a lot of my colleagues are going to go 
to one of our national parks or more. Some of them live, as one told me 
recently, in the shadow of one of our national parks. Folks who live in 
places like Montana and Wyoming see the parks all the time. As I said, 
I will be at our largest park, Cuyahoga Valley National Park. This is a 
time for us to see the parks, tour the parks, find out what the needs 
are, and, hopefully, come back here to Congress in September and do 
something about this deferred maintenance.
  I urge my colleagues, first, on the Energy and Natural Resources 
Committee, to take this bill up. Let's mark it up, again, as soon as 
possible after the recess. Let's not wait any longer until things get 
worse. I look forward to working with my colleagues to get this 
legislation on the floor of the Senate, to get it voted on, and to have 
a companion bill that is still being worked on in the House voted on as

[[Page S5294]]

well. Let's get something done and send it to the President for his 
signature so we can ensure that these treasures, our national parks, 
are there for generations to come.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Young). The Senator from New Jersey.

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