U.S. Sens. Mary Landrieu and David Vitter announced Thursday the passage of a $1.2 billion act amendment designed to fund coastal restoration efforts in the Gulf states.
The amendment to the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, COBRA, will add money to the $200 million Vitter proposed last week, bringing the total to $1.4 billion.
COBRA protects the health care benefits of people who leave their jobs for any reason.
The amendment will be tacked onto COBRA and will go to coastal restoration for states devastated by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
“Katrina showed the nation what the people of Louisiana have always known – our wetlands are our first defense against natural disasters,” Landrieu said in a news release Thursday. “If Washington is serious about helping the people of the Gulf Coast rebuild our communities, they must commit to restoring our wetlands.”
The joint amendment came one day after Landrieu introduced and later withdrew a $1 billion amendment for coastal restoration.
Adam Sharp, spokesman for Landrieu, said she withdrew her previous amendment because she wanted to ensure the money went to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida – the states affected by the hurricanes – and not other energy-producing states, such as Alaska and California.
“The bill from yesterday put $1 billion in the Energy Bill’s budget, which does not specifically target hurricane-affected states,” Sharp said in a telephone interview from Washington. “Now the money is added to the $200 million Sen. Vitter announced last week and put into the Commerce Committee’s budget for the affected states only.”
Sharp said the money to save the coasts will come from an auction in which the government will sell off its analog broadcast television and radio stations.
The analog wireless spectrum will become obsolete for mass media broadcasting as broadcasters switch their format from analog to digital.
Sharp said the auction is expected to be held within the next few months.
“TV stations are switching from analog to digital, and that analog wireless spectrum is going to be auctioned off to law enforcement agencies,” he said. “The auction is expected to bring in at least $10 billion, but some experts project the revenue to be between $20 and $30 billion.”
Sharp said Senate Commerce Committee has already spent $5 billion of the auction’s expected revenue, and the amendment outlines the order in which the rest will be spent.
Sharp said $1 billion generated from the auction will go toward the $7.9 trillion national debt.
The second $500 million will pay for communications systems for emergency first responders.
The next $1.2 billion will go to restoring the coastal wetlands.
“This $1.2 billion in new revenue will serve as another tool to support our coastal restoration efforts without taxing the American public or creating more of a deficit,” Vitter said in a news release.
While Sharp said the governors of the affected states will be deciding the plan for spending the money, one University professor said it may be a difficult task to decide how to best address coastal restoration.
Andy Nyman, renewable natural resources assistant professor and specialist in wetland and wildlife ecology, said he thinks the best way to address coastal restoration is to take a two-pronged approach.
“I try to get people to think of it like a bank account,” Nyman said. “You want to preserve what you have in your account while also trying to gain money on top of what you already have.”
Nyman said the biggest problem facing coastal restoration comes from trying to control the natural course of the Mississippi River to make it easily accessible to the shipping industry and to control flooding.
“We’ve stopped the river from doing what it naturally does: nourishing existing wetlands and building new wetlands,” he said. “The river changes course every thousand years or so, and it was about to build a large amount of wetlands in the ’50s, but we didn’t allow it to do that.”
Nyman said local solutions to restoring the wetlands can be something as simple as installing culverts or allowing water to drain out of over-flooded marshes in areas suffering wetland losses.
“Local solutions are very site-specific, and you need an expert to determine the best solution for a particular area,” Nyman said. “But what will really help to address the problem is to let the river do as much wetland building as we can stand without affecting our navigation needs.”
 
Contact Jeff Jeffrey at [email protected]