On June 10 President Obama signed the Water Resources Reform Development Act (WRRDA) into law. The conference report was approved overwhelmingly in the Senate by a vote of 91-7 and by an even more remarkable margin of 412-4 in the House of Representatives. WRRDA is the first Army Corps of Engineers authorization since 2007. NSPE endorsed this vital legislation and sent a letter of support to the bill’s primary sponsor, Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-PA) in September 2013. In the letter to Chairman Shuster, NSPE President Robert Green, P.E., F. NSPE praised WRRDA for “overhauling and dramatically improving the process for federal water resources development. The legislation sets hard deadlines on the time and cost of studies, consolidates or eliminates duplicative studies and concurrent reviews that can hold up projects for years, and streamlines environmental reviews. WRRDA fully offsets new authorizations with deauthorizations and cancels $12 billion of inactive projects that were approved prior to the 2007 Water Resources Development Act. This legislation maximizes the ability of nonfederal interests to contribute their own funds to move authorized studies and projects forward. Moreover, it substantially reduces project backlogs." For more information or questions concerning the enactment of the Water Resources Reform and Development Act, please contact NSPE's Manager of Government Relations Arielle Eiser at aeiser@nspe.org.
