WASHINGTON D.C. (NMB) – In a 69-30 vote, the bipartisan infrastructure bill has cleared the U.S. Senate.
The $1 trillion bill includes over $550 billion in new funding, and much of the money will be used on projects on the Hi-Line.
A press release from Senator Jon Tester, one of the members of the bipartisan negotiating group, says the bill includes up to $100 million for rehabilitating the Milk River Project, approximately $198 million for the Rocky Boys/North Central Rural Water System, and at least $20 million in grants to reclaim abandoned land mines.
Senator Steve Daines was one of 30 Republicans that voted in opposition to the bill, stating that it will increase the federal deficit by $256 billion. He also expressed concern about the Democrats’ plan to pass a $4 trillion budget resolution through reconciliation, which he says contains “several radical, far-left policies,” and is a “partisan, tax and spending spree.”
The bill now heads towards the U.S. House of Representatives, where its future is unclear.
“I am very hopeful that the House will recognize that trying to marry it to the bigger spending package is going to make for a tough Conference Committee between the House and the Senate long-term, and hope that they don’t drag this out for months,” says Marko Manoukian, Co-Chair of the St. Mary’s Rehabilitation Working Group, which has worked for nearly two decades to obtain funding to repair the Milk River System. “Because the drought situation that we’ve undergone here, we’re starting to see large liquidation of livestock, and really, the only green spot in the Hi-Line of Montana all the way through North Dakota and parts of Minnesota is the Milk River. So it’s really important to the people that use that as a drinking source and for the forage production that it does to support our livestock industry, who have already undergone some pressures from the drought and grasshopper issue…Hopefully with an investment like that, it kind of stabilizes the water system. Like this year, we had to shut off (irrigation) early just because we used more because of the dry conditions and no help from rain than we could transfer from Sherburne. And Sherburne has a lot of water in it. So it’s going to have to be done out of season, some of those transfers for municipality uses. Again, to me, it’s just shooting ourselves in the foot by not investing in fixing that infrastructure that we’ve come to another drought year and we’re shutting the water off early.
