Kilmer Secures Critical Funding for Puget Sound Restoration

Thank you, Madame Chair and before I begin I wanted to just take a brief moment to thank you for your incredible leadership on this Committee and to Echo the comments made by my colleagues over the last few days. It's been said that leadership is not about being in charge. It's about taking care of those in your charge and I wanna thank you for the care that you've shown to the members of this Committee and to the people we represent. You care about our constituents, you care about our communities, and you care about our families. Our priorities and concerns are your priorities and concerns too, and on behalf of my constituents and on behalf of three constituents in the Kilmer family, I just want to say thank you for being a special and impactful leader. So thank you. I also as I extend gratitude wanna do so to chair McCollum and ranking member Joyce and our incredibly dedicated Committee staff for the work on this bill. I represent a district that is touched by nearly every agency funded in this bill. My district is home to 11 Native American Tribes, the Olympic National Forest and National Park, the nation's largest estuary by volume Puget Sound, five National wildlife refugees and a brand new National heritage area. So every day, I see firsthand how the investments made in this bill help to grow our rural economies, uphold our treaty and trust obligations to Native Americans and protect our environment for generations to come and there's a lot in this bill to be proud of. But I wanna start by thanking you for including 38 million dollars for the Puget Sound Geographic Program - a critical five million dollar increase over fiscal year 2020 that will help our regional partners begin making real progress on the coordinated effort to recover the Sound. Last summer, Chairman McCollum and Ranking Member Joyce, You were both kind enough to travel out to my neck of the Woods to meet with local stakeholders, tribal leaders, small business owners, fishermen, shellfish growers, farmers, to see how these investments actually translate into coordinated on the ground projects - that will help to recover not only the health of our sound, but also iconic species like salmon and Orca and the countless livelihoods that depend on a healthy Puget Sound and I am grateful that this bill reflects our shared commitment to recovering the iconic body of water, which is also a key economic driver for our region and rejects the President's short-sighted proposal to eliminate this program entirely. Also, I wanna take a minute just to recognize that this important funding increase and countless others in this bill were made possible because later this month, Congress will finally pass the Great American Outdoors Act to permanently Fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund and established a new dedicated funding to address the multi-billion dollar maintenance backlog at our National parks and other public lands. As someone who's worked to make these investments mandatory and as a leading cosponsor of the bill, I'm excited to see this finally come to fruition and I wanna thank my good friend and colleague Mr. Simpson for his dedication and leadership on this effort that has gotten us here. As our nation continues to grapple with the crippling economic and public health consequences of this pandemic, these investments will create needed jobs and provide a critical lifeline to the communities I represent and to countless others around our country that depend on a healthy outdoor recreation economy. So I'm extremely proud of the values and priorities reflected in this bill, in combination with the Great American Outdoors Act, and I urge my colleagues to support both. Thank you and I yield back.