Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. HECK. Mr. Chairman, I want to ask for the chairwoman's assistance on an impending threat to our national security.

Roads surrounding military installations play an important role in preserving military readiness. Our Armed Forces need to mobilize quickly, and we need functional roads in order to do that. The same is true for other infrastructure supporting defense communities where our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines live and raise their families.

This is a problem all over this country and a severe one, but it is especially acute right outside Joint Base Lewis-McChord in the 10th Congressional District of Washington, which I have the privilege to represent and is the largest force projection base in the Western United States. More than 50,000 people report to work there every day. It is the second most requested location in the Army, second to Hawaii. Still, I am thrilled when they get new things like, recently, the C-17 Weapons Instructor Course and a Security Force Assistance Brigade.

What I am not thrilled about is the frustratingly long wait times at the front gate for JBLM or the heavy traffic diverting through neighborhoods to avoid traffic jams.

My very first term in Congress, I introduced the COMMUTE Act to help address these issues. I have been working on the problem every year since. This year, both the House and Senate authorizing committees acknowledged this need by creating the Defense Community Infrastructure Program, or DCIP. This program builds off the COMMUTE Act and encourages infrastructure projects near military installations that are caused by their presence.

I know being stuck in traffic is not something unknown to most Americans. We are all too familiar with the horrible feeling of approaching an unexpected slow crawl on the road. But when this affects our military's ability to get to the base to do the job and be ready for anything, that is when we can't just sit and sit and wait and wait, as I have, year in and year out, for it to get better.

If servicemembers cannot get on and off base, they may decide to never leave the base. But military bases are not islands in our districts. They are integral parts of the community. Expecting servicemembers to stay behind the force protection of their bases exacerbates the civil-military divide.

It is shortsighted and foolhardy not to consider the infrastructure surrounding and supporting our installations. The Federal Government must play a role in addressing military community infrastructure projects.

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Mr. HECK. Mr. Chair, I thank the chairwoman very much for acknowledging this problem and for her commitment to work to address it.

Over the summer, I will work with relevant stakeholders, including the authorizing committees, the Secretary of Defense, and the Association of Defense Communities, which strongly supports this proposal, to get the gentlewoman and her staff a sense of the scope of this problem.

I look forward to working with the Defense Subcommittee on tackling the problem and finding the resources to update and repair infrastructure around military bases.

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