[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 9]
[House]
[Page 12049]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     PASS THE FAMILIES OF FLINT ACT

  (Mr. HUFFMAN asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, the ongoing crisis in Flint, Michigan, is a 
clear reminder that this Congress has unfinished work to do.
  Our constituents will rightly judge our job performance by our work, 
not by our finger-pointing, not by empty expressions of concern. We 
need to get to work, and we need to work together to provide clean 
water for the people of Flint; but we can't stop there because Flint is 
not an isolated incident. We have seen dangerous lead levels in schools 
that are outside of Fresno, California, and that are even in our own 
Capitol buildings here in Washington, D.C.
  What has happened in Flint is a symptom of a much greater ill of 
underinvestment in our Nation's clean water infrastructure. A 
generation ago, it was a Republican President and a Californian, Ronald 
Reagan, who signed significant updates to the Safe Drinking Water Act 
in 1986. He knew then that clean water infrastructure was not a 
partisan issue. Thirty years later, it is our turn. The bipartisan case 
for investing in clean water infrastructure has never been stronger.
  Every single American deserves access to clean and safe drinking 
water. So let's get to work. Let's pass the Families of Flint Act, and 
let's work on a national clean water infrastructure plan to prevent 
another disaster like this from happening in the future.

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