The House last week voted 317 to 101 to approve a bill that would provide $13.8 billion in federal grants over five years to capitalize clean water state revolving funds.
Clean and drinking water SRFs are used to make low-interest loans to localities for certain infrastructure projects. Under the terms of the House bill, states would also be allowed to forgive loan principal or make negative-interest loans, which essentially are grants.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is expected to consider its own bill, with funding for both clean and drinking water SRFs.
The $13.8 billion in the House measure would be in addition to $4 billion provided in the stimulus act for clean water SRFs and would be about the same as the amount proposed in President Obama's fiscal 2010 budget summary.
States would be required to use at least 15% of their clean water SRF capitalization grants to give financial assistance to small municipalities, and earmarking would be prohibited for any funds appropriated from clean water SRFs, under the House bill.
An amendment by House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman James L. Oberstar, D-Minn., would add unemployment rates and per-capita income to the factors states must consider when determining "affordability criteria" for wastewater projects. Oberstar's amendment also would require the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct, and make publicly available, an annual performance review of clean water SRFs, including how many jobs were created from them.
The federal funding in the bill would "give additional assistance to proactively identify the infrastructure requiring replacement prior to failure," said Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., during a floor speech.
"In south Florida, the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department evaluated its wastewater needs through the year 2020 and determined that in order to maintain adequate transmission systems capability, treatment, disposal, and the prevention of sanitary sewer overflows, that department ... would have to spend over $2 billion," he said.
Meanwhile, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is expected to consider its own water funding bill, building from a measure that won committee approval in September but died in the Senate.
That bill, which was introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chair of the committee, is not scheduled for a committee vote at this time but was called a "high priority" by a congressional source Friday.
The measure would authorize $15 billion for drinking water state revolving funds, and $20 billion for clean water SRFs, distributed in incremental amounts over five years. The SRFs could be used as a source of revenue to repay general obligation bonds issued by the state or to provide matching funds if bond proceeds were deposited in them, under the terms of the bill.
Funding provisions in the bill also included $25 million and $15 million each year for rural small- and medium-sized water treatment facilities, respectively. It would have allowed states to reserve either 2% or $100,000 from their annual allotment for planning purposes.
In addition, it would have given state governors the ability to transfer the capitalization grants between clean and drinking water SRFs.
