Washington, DC— U.S. Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) released the following statement regarding Lewis and Clark Rural Water System receiving an additional $5 million this year.
The additional $5 million is good for Lewis and Clark. I wish it would have been more, but it does represent a more than tenfold increase in funding for the project compared with the Bureau of Reclamation’s original proposal. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, I supported increasing the overall funding for rural water projects nationwide, but the ultimate decisions on distributing funding to specific projects was up the Bureau. It’s important that we keep working to provide every last dime possible for Lewis and Clark, since it is vitally important to our state and the region. I will continue fighting for this project as we move forward.
The funding announced today comes from an additional $30 million provided for rural water projects in the final Fiscal Year 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations bill that was signed into law on December 23, 2011. That measure also included $487,000 for Lewis & Clark directly, bringing the projects total funding for Fiscal Year 2012 to $5.487 million.
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