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This week's flooding provides a window into the relative effectiveness of Congressman Mike Ferguson to advocate and deliver for the people of New Jersey's 7th Congressional District.
The year before Ferguson took office Hurricane Floyd hit our state, and towns like Bound Brook and Manville were devastated, with water rising to third stories of buildings and not falling for days. Other towns like North Plainfield - where I served as a Councilman at the time - had six feet of water rushing through the town. I know because I was one of the volunteers pulling people out of their cars to safety that day.
Now, in Mike Ferguson's seventh year as our DC Representative we have seen another flood provide the same kind of destruction. Added to the 1996 flooding of downtown Bound Brook that is three devastating floods in just over a decade.
I looked at the pictures of boats floating past second floor windows in downtown Bound Brook and thought it was 1999 all over again. The personal and business destruction is horrific, and the worst part is that it should be wholly unnecessary had our federal representatives come through with the funding we need to fix these flooding issues.
Since 1975 the Green Brook Flood Control Project has been studying and planning to make major engineering changes to the Raritan River and its tributaries to increase flow and retention, reducing the chance that such flooding can occur again. But all we have to date is a bridge and two levies, and the Army Corps of engineers estimates it will take $430 million in today's money to finish the deal.
You would think that after Floyd there would have been a major effort to fund this project, to get it going as fast as possible to protect the residents and business owners along this flood path. You would think that there would be some urgency to the work to protect our residents from continued natural disasters.
Mike Ferguson was first elected in 2000, along with a Republican President, a Republican Senate and a Republican House. His colleague, Rodney Frelinghuysen on the neighboring 11th district, was on the House Appropriations committee. Ferguson himself was being groomed by Tom DeLay in a leadership position as minority whip, the Texas House wheeler and dealer who could get anything done.
Add to this the fact that under Republican leadership earmarked funding for districts increased from about 1,000 a year in 1996 to 14,000 in 2005. Some of these earmarks were incredible, including $454 million for a bridge in Alaska that would have served just a few thousand people.
It's an ideal environment for a Representative to represent the needs of his district. His party in control, friendly with leadership, delegation member on the Appropriations committee money handed out hand over fist, and a real desperate need for completion of a project that would affect hundreds of thousands of people. It would take a pretty high level of incompetence to blow this one.
So what did Mike Ferguson get us for the Green Brook Flood Control Project? An average of less than $5 million a year, and some press releases and photo opportunities for the Congressman to show he cares.
At that rate, the project would take 86 years to completely fund, not including inflation and cost overruns.
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