Goal: Promote health for all through a healthy environment.
Objectives: Improving water quality monitoring and surveillance will reduce exposure to contaminants in drinking water, fish, and shellfish, and recreational waters.
Track the Nation's success in reducing exposures to toxic substances and hazardous waste, thus minimizing their effects on the populations health.
Progress: Water quality in the U.S./Mexico border region met/exceeded target. (I am assuming this is before the BP oil spill crisis)
Disparities: No data for water quality available.
Opportunities and challenges: The passing of the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health (BEACH) Act in October 2000 amended the Clean Water Act to (1) establish a national grants program to improve consistency of water quality standards, beach monitoring, and public notification approaches and also strengthen national information collection.
Emerging issues: Beach monitoring programs are typically run by local health agencies and vary by location. Monitoring results are inconsistent because agencies use indicator organisms and varying monitoring frequencies. As part of its beach grand program, EPA has set performance criteria that States and other governments must meet to receive beach grants. These criteria are expected to improve the reporting of beach advisory data.
Proposed bill: H.CON.RES.309
Title: Expressing the sense of Congress regarding the need for a $500 million recover fund cofusing exclusively on travel and tourism to be administered by he Gulf Coast Claims Facility in the wake of the BP oil spill.
Sponsor: Rep Rush, Bobby L. [IL-1] (introduced 7/29/2010) Co-sponsor: Rep Castor, Kathy [FL-11]- 9/15/10
Latest Major Action: 7/29/10 Referred to House committee. Status: Referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
My Recommendation: Vote "Yes" for H.CON.RES.309 Referred to House.
My Political Representative: Congresswoman Amy Klobuchar
I'm curious as to what the progress chart would say after the BP oil spill. After the mess the oil spill made of the environment, it's important that we clean it up and try to keep other water areas clean.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering what will be the long term outcome of the BP oil spill. I'm glad that BP is being held accountable but money doesnt fix everything.
ReplyDeleteDane this bill seems like it will have a lot of interesting information to cover and can be kind of controversial. It will be great to see where this goes.
ReplyDeleteThe comments about BP would really raise some good questions, that would be interesting to find out. This is a very interesting and I am excited to learn more about this bill.
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