This was a weekend of service with the Navy Reserve for me, sandwiched between two Committee Weeks in Tallahassee so if there's more typos in this e-mail than usual, you know why!
In this update, I have news on our local economic recovery, green components of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and a quick update from Tallahassee.
Click the chart above to see a higher quality version on Facebook (and a pie chart of job-loss by industry). As you'll see, we've helped tens of thousands of our neighbor's unemployment claims since the pandemic began, but things are really starting to turn around as we've successfully put shots in arms and dollars into people's pockets.
Maybe it's the 4+ hour drives I now do twice a week to Tallahassee, but I've been thinking a lot lately about transportation infrastructure and opportunities for resiliency. Think about it, we have thousands of miles of highway across the county, if we mowed just 10' less per side and allowed trees to grow, we would be effectively planting millions of trees at no cost.
So, I called Congresswoman Kathy Castor who heads the federal Democratic Climate Change Task Force and BOOM, natural resiliency is being included in the bipartisan infrastructure bill! As you know, things are still changing daily, but here's a snapshot of what's included:
🛤 $8.7 B in Transportation resilience planning and project investments
🦊 $350M for wildlife crossing safety pilot program
🌳 Emergency relief that includes natural infrastructure as a tool to build back better
🏝 Builds into National Highway Performance Program a purpose of enhancing the resiliency of the system to climate impacts and includes natural infrastructure as a protective feature that enhances resilience
💵 Adds as eligible use of block grant funds projects and strategies to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions, EV charging infrastructure and protective features including natural infrastructure
🏞️ $1B over 5 years (and additional $4 B is authorized) for culvert removal, replacement and restoration for states to address water through roads, bridges, railroad tracks and trails
Also this week, someone asked me about an article came out in the paper if I was comfortable in East County advocating for the penny sales tax for transportation. In a snapshot, here's why I am so confident this is a winning issue for us:
Our roads suck, there's no way around that. Traffic in Brandon and Riverview is a nightmare and I'm running against a guy who has single-handedly blocked billions of dollars from going to fix the problem. So, am I comfortable making this race about transportation? You betcha!
If you want to help me fix the damn roads, you should support our campaign! The more support we get here and now, the clearer the signal will be to Commissioner White that our County has moved on and his style of over-development and lack of infrastructure and we're leaving it in the rear-view-mirror.
Now, I should probably put the cute picture up top instead of at the bottom of the e-mail, but it's content placement like this that makes sure y'all always read all the way to the bottom! :)
