Washington, D.C. – Today, during a House Appropriations Committee hearing, Representative Derek Kilmer (D-WA) pressed Trump Administration officials for answers as to why programs that create jobs and protect rural communities are cut in their proposed budget. Kilmer asked the Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, why a program that provided a key investment to help Port Angeles’s Composite Recycling Technology Center open was slated for elimination. He also sought an explanation for the zeroing out of an initiative that helps rural communities on the coast counter rising sea levels and tsunami threats.
The Port Angeles composite center won federal grants through the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration and recently received the 2017 Washington Manufacturing Award from Seattle Business Magazine.
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross appeared before the Commerce, Justice, Science, and related agencies.
Kilmer pointed out the importance of the Administration to the Port Angeles project, and others like it.
Kilmer said: “Before I came to Congress I worked in economic development professionally and worked often with the only agency at the federal level whose sole purpose is economic development and that’s the Economic Development Administration. I represent a district that has a lot of areas that are really struggling. My hometown of Port Angeles is one of those distressed communities. And with the help of the EDA’s Regional Innovation Strategies Program we started up a composite recycling center in that town with an investment of $500,000 which is a drop in the bucket for the federal government. The recycling center is going to establish a new industry and bring much needed jobs into an area that needs it. I am perplexed that the Department would choose to eliminate one of the federal government’s strongest supporters of job creation. I know that the rationale is stated as it being duplicative. I would love to understand what programs EDA is duplicative of and what’s the rationale for eliminating it.”
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Editorial Comment: When I first heard of the opportunity of having a high tech trade like composites, I thought it would be under private business hands, not funded by government handouts. It was good to have the assistance of the government in this new industry to start it, but at some point you have to prove if your new product can be marketed in the private sector not continually funded by government grants, and loans. When does it fall into private hands Congressman Kilmer? If the composite trade is a boon it should survive the private sector, right now all they seem to be building out of the composites are park benches! So, we are getting governmental grants, and loans for park benches....something wrong with that picture?
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