{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=BBDD49D9-AE57-40AA-AED3-1C4B88CC65BE", "On Senate Floor, Portman Joins Colleagues to Discuss Bipartisan Restore Our Parks Act", "2018-12-19", "2018", "2018-12", "Republican", "House", "OH", "Rob Portman", "P000449", "www.portman.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "WASHINGTON, D.C.  Yesterday, U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) joined his colleagues Angus King (I-ME) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) to discuss the Restore Our Parks Act, bipartisan legislation they co-authored that would help address more than half of the nearly$12 billion backlog of long-delayed maintenance projects at the National Park Service. The bill would do so by establishing the National Park Service Legacy Restoration Fund to reduce the maintenance backlog by allocating half of the existing unobligated revenues the government receives from on and offshore energy development up to $1.3 billion per year for the next five years.The Restore Our Parks Act passed the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources by a bipartisan margin of 19-4 and awaits action on the Senate floor.\r\nTranscript of his remarks can be found below and a video can be found here.\r\n\r\nI'm here on the floor today to talk about legislation that helps our national parks, something that everyone on this floor has been supportive of over the years, and I'm here with a couple of colleagues who spent a lot of time and effort focused on that issue. One isSenatorAngus King, who is an Independent, although he organizes over there with the Democrats. He and his colleague,SenatorMark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, have been very involved in this issue and have introduced legislation to address the unmet needs in our parks. It's a critical issue right now, $12 billion in a deferred maintenance backlog in our national parks. Many of our roads and bridges and water systems and railroads in my home state, where we have a railroad running through a national park, are crumbling and we need to address it. We're going to hear a little fromSenatorKing today about that.\r\nThe other colleague I want to talk about isSenatorAlexander. He has been a champion for the parks over the years. In fact, my recollection is a few decades ago President Ronald Reagan named him to a commission on the outdoors, probably when he was governor of Tennessee, one of his many jobs he's had, including being secretary of education, and also president of the University of Tennessee. But through all his jobs and through his lifetime he has been a huge supporter of the national parks and understands as well as anybody else, given he's from Tennessee, where they have unmet needs, the desperate need right now for us to figure out a way to address this maintenance backlog.\r\nI mentioned $12 billion. That's a big price tag and it's more than the funding we give the parks each year can possibly accommodate. It's about long-term capital costs. I think it was Senator Alexander and others who have said it's almost like we have a debt unpaid. That debt needs to be paid in order for us to continue to have our national parks. We have a shining example for our country and the rest of the world. 330 million visitors last year at our national parks. Think about that.\r\nVisitation is up and yet you have this crumbling infrastructure and huge issues that must be addressed. We've come up with a creative way to deal with it. It takes the revenue from the onshore and offshore federal energy projects and says, ok if it's on federal land, some of the royalties come to the federal government. Let's take not the money that's already going to the Land and Water Conservation Fund and other good purposes, but let's take half of the part that has no other allocation currently and let's use it to address this issue. And by doing so, we think we can address half of the backlog, about $6 billion over the next five years.\r\nNow it so happens that the National Park Service has been asked to look at all these projects and come up with which ones are of immediate concernand where there's a true crisis where you've got to address it now or the need's going to get much greater. And, by the way, the taxpayer costs are going to increase dramatically because this is a compounding problem. When you don't fix the roof you end up having to repair and replace the entire building. We believe there is a way to do this, a sensible way for us to use some of this funding. And guess what? So do a lot of other people all around the country because we've got support from all kinds of groups who are supporting the parks around the country, conservation groups, groups that care a lot about what the experience is of the visitor at the parks.\r\nWe've also got support from our colleagues in the House. They have a companion bill that's bipartisan also, Republicans and Democrats alike are supporting it. It's gotten strong support in their committees over there, as this bill has gotten in our committee here. In fact, it got out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee with a big bipartisan vote. And then finally, and in some respects maybe most importantly, as a former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the administration is supporting it, because sometimes the administration is careful about supporting proposals that have to do with this sort of spending, the mandatory spending, so called that comes from the revenue from these natural gas and oil resources that are on federal lands, offshore and onshore.\r\nWe have the Trump administration supporting it. We have so many colleagues on both sides of the aisle supporting it. We have so many outside groups supporting it. Why? It's just time to do it. It's very a sensible idea. It will save taxpayer dollars over the long haul because, again, by fixing these crumbling projects and infrastructure you won't have the huge additional costs that would be borne otherwise. Let's face it, these parks are our treasure and our legacy, and we need to protect them.\r\nWith that, I'm going to ask my colleague from Tennessee to say a few words and my colleague from Maine to say a few words in whatever order they would like to go in. Let me just finally say, this is a sad note. I learned on Monday that my colleague from Tennessee who is about to speak has decided that at age 78 it's time for him to enjoy a more peaceful and enjoyable lifestyle outside the United States Senate, and he's not running for reelection in two years. Two years is a long time. We're going to get a lot done together. This bill is one of them. I'm going to miss him a lot. He is the best legislator, I think, in the United States Senate, which I think is saying a lot. There are a lot of great legislators here. He can bring together different partiesnot just Democrats and Republicans, but sometimes within our parties personalities and so on are not easy to deal with. He manages to smooth all the feathers and get things done. I hope this parks bill will be an example of that. He's been a leader on this issue, and I've had a great experience working with him already, and, again, I hope that working together this will be one of the many legacy items that he will get to talk to his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren about.\r\nWith that, I would like to turn it over to Senator King from Maine and then Senator Alexander from Tennessee\r\nI appreciate the comments of my colleagues, both from Maine and from Tennessee. They're both absolutely right, this legislation is ready to be passed. We've done the hard work, we've done the research, and we've looked at a number of creative ways to handle this backlog that everybody wants to get at. Everybody agrees that our national parks are such crown jewels of our country and we need to address it. Everybody knows that if you don't fix the roof and the building ends up falling down, you have to pay a lot more. So to the point that this is a debt unpaid, it is also a debt that grows because it compounds over time, and these are two former governors who just spoke, and they did this in their own states, what you might call capital budgetingin other words, looking not just at your annual expenses for, in this case, park rangers and naturalists, but to actually look at how do you take a building that is about to fall down and put the enormous expense into that to ensure that you are that you save money over time.\r\nI will say that I've been all around my state. We don't have parks that are quite as big as Acadia or the Smokies, but we do have a lot of beautiful parks in Ohio. One is the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It is actually number 13 in the country now on visitation, between Akron and Cleveland, Ohio. It is a fantastic opportunity for young people who come every year, school kids. And, by the way, there's lots of volunteer work going on at all of these parks, including Cuyahoga Valley. We're not talking about displacing the volunteer work that's being done. It's very effective at building the trails, at ensuring that young people in particular can be involved in helping our national parks, that they have an opportunity to do so.\r\nThere's also a lot of friends groups out there. The friends group in Cuyahoga Valley National Park happens to be headed now by the national president of the friends group. All these parks have great groups of private citizens who give their money, private foundations who give their money, for our national parks. That's all needed. But they cannot afford the $12 billion maintenance backlog that is the responsibility of the federal government. And so $47 million, as an example, is needed at Cuyahoga Valley National Park to fix the railroad I talked about, to fix a bridge that I saw about to fall down, to fix the roof at a visitor center that's about to fall down. It's also $47 million for a monument off Lake Erie. The Perry Monument. And some of you know the story of Admiral Perry, well there is a seawall there to protect the Perry Monument and the interpretive center there. Well that seawall is crumbling. And it's a huge expense to repair a seawall as a coastal governor like Governor King will tell you.\r\nAnd so that's a maintenance backlog issue that has to be addressed in this kind of a capital bill. I am very excited about the opportunity to get this done. I think Senator Alexander is right, it is going to be difficult to get it done this week because we're up against the end of the year and we have so many other priorities. On the other hand, this one has not just bipartisan support, but I would say nonpartisan support, and bicameral support. And it's one of those that, I think Senator Alexander is exactly right, we ought to put at the top of the agenda. It will be a great win.\r\nI think the American people are looking for wins right now. I think people are wondering, how can divided government work? Here is an example of how it can work. You have the administration, Democrats, and Republicans alike saying this is a problemlong in the making, by the wayit has been years and years of us delaying the expenditures for these capital improvements that are needed. And wouldn't it be great, so we're going to hit the ground running. Come January we'll reintroduce our legislation with Senator Alexander and Senator King and Senator Warner are going to be out there getting cosponsorsfor any staff who happen to be listening, we're talking to you and your member because you ought to be on this bill, if you're not one of the more than one-third of the Senate that's already a part of it.\r\nAnd I just can't thank my colleagues enough for showing up today to talk a little about this. I know Senator Warner is busy with other meetings right now, but speaking for him, I will just say he came up with this, I think, very creative idea. I want to thank him for his hard work on this and I know that his home state with the Blue Ridge and other great national parks, he's got the same sense of urgency that all of us have, which is if we don't address this and don't address this now, we're going to see the visitor experience be diminished, we're going to see lot of higher costs for taxpayers. This is the time. We have the organizations behind us. Senator Alexander talked about 100 conservation organizations. I didn't know there were 100 conservation organizations. But they're all on board and they understand that this is the opportunity to do something very significant. I think Senator Alexander is right. Probably in the 100-year history of our national parks there has never been a single bill that can make such a big difference, maybe not since Teddy Roosevelt decided to start acquiring land to protect our American treasures. So we need to get this done, and I thank my colleagues and I welcome them to make any final comments.\r\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=BBDD49D9-AE57-40AA-AED3-1C4B88CC65BE"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.7445350531488657, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}