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President Bush spends a good part of this Friday in the Kansas City area. It begins with a Presidential Proclamation in honor of American Heart Month, followed by a breakfast with business leaders.
Bush then tours Hallmark Cards, where he’ll talk about the economy. He wraps up the Missouri visit attending a reception for Congressman Sam Graves.
Governor Blunt is asking President Bush to declare 42 counties hit by ice storms two weeks ago as disaster areas. The governor’s request says damage to public infrastructure in those areas totals at least $28 million.
Federal aid will soon be on the way to Missouri to help the state recover from the severe winter storms. President Bush has granted Governor Matt Blunt’s request for federal assistance. The Governor got the word late Wednesday.
Blunt has announced nine joint federal, state, and local damage assessment teams will canvass Missouri counties, beginning Thursday, to collect information on the storm damage to public infrastructure, public utilities, emergency services, and debris removal issues. The information collected will be used to support Missouri’s request for all categories of federal public assistance which will reimburse communities for their winter storm response and recovery actions for their incurred expenses.
The teams are comprised of local officials as well as officials from FEMA – the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and SEMA – the State Emergency Management Agency.
Senator Bond says the importance of water projects to Missouri outweighed any loyalty to the president and led to his role in the first successful override of President Bush.
Bond says the $1.95 billion in federal funds authorized for new locks on the upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers and the $1.72 billion for environmental restoration are needed in Missouri. Bond says Senators from the East and West Coasts don’t understand the need in the Midwest for these water projects.
Bond defends his tenacious fight for the projects against criticism leveled by the White House and by a few fellow senators. The Water Resources Development Act, known by the unwieldy acronym of WRDA, authorizes billions of dollars in water projects. Funding of those projects must come later, during the appropriations process. The WRDA bill had been held up for a variety of reasons since 2001.
Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, argues that no new Army Corps of Engineers’ projects should have been authorized until a $58 billion backlog of projects is cleared up. Bond rejects the arguments, saying that most of the backlog projects are no longer priorities of the Corps and should be scrapped in favor of new priorities, such as the upgraded locks system, key to barge traffic on the Mississippi River.
Bond says he warned the White House not to veto the bill. Bond is known for being very loyal to President Bush, a fellow Republican. He says he told the president’s people that he would lead the fight to override the president, because he considered the projects too important to Missouri. The WRDA override was the first successful override of President Bush.
President Bush’s veto of WRDA – the Water Resources Development Act – has been overridden by Congress.
The Senate has voted 79-14 in favor of the override, with Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) voting to override and Senator McCaskill (D-MO) voting to sustain the veto. The U.S. House had previously voted 361-54 to override.
WRDA authorizes a number of projects. Of particular interest to Missouri is authorization of funding for projects that include the construction of seven new locks and dams along the upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers.
This marks the first time Congress has been able to muster the votes to override one of President Bush’s vetoes.
