Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., says cuts to congressional earmarks and domestic spending could threaten West Virginia’s infrastructure projects if not done narrowly.

Rahall publicly bashed “recent proposals by the new majority in the U.S. House of Representatives” at a groundbreaking project in Mingo County earlier this week. The proposed cuts, an effort to reduce the federal deficit, take too broad of an approach, Rahall said, and threaten critical West Virginia projects.

“I preach vehemently against just taking the meat-ax approach to everything,” Rahall said the day after the groundbreaking. “Yes, we’re all for cuts, but we have to be careful or we may be doing our economy and doing the recovery more harm than we can ever envision.”

The project in Mingo County involves a water main extension that received more than $2.2 million in USDA Rural Development loan funds to provide public water service to the Harvey Magisterial District of Mingo County. The public water source will feed about 119 houses that currently depend on wells, springs and other sources of water.

“We lack a lot of basic services like clean water, and that could have many more ramifications for our people than just not having water,” Rahall said. “It means the health of our children and grandchildren. Highway infrastructure is not only how we get to work and get our children safely to school, but also how we get our coal to its market.”

Rahall, the top democrat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said infrastructure shortages are a problem across the nation.

“We have a great deficit in infrastructure in this country,” Rahall said. “Whether it’s water, or highways, sewage systems or broadband technologies, these are deficits that we can not exacerbate by just broad, meat-ax approach to cutting everything.”

In a release from his office regarding comments made at the project, Rahall states that investing in infrastructure puts Americans to work.

“Without basic services, like clean water, even the health of families can falter. And as for highways, if people can’t get to work safely or commerce clogs in tunnels, on bridges, or through locks on our rivers, we as a nation lose,” Rahall said. “Our competition throughout the world then gains a competitive advantage. For the short term, and in the long run, strengthening the foundations of our economy pays great dividends throughout our economy.”

Rahall continued, saying infrastructure projects should be viewed not merely as an expense, but an investment.

“I have long been convinced, and will continue to preach, that the price of doing nothing, the price of letting our water and wastewater services deteriorate, the cost of our highways and bridges crumbling, the debt that grows as our  broadband digital divide widens are not ‘financial burdens’ as some see them,” Rahall said. “To me, they are the very basic things the people elect their government to fix. Put simply, these are investments in our country’s future.”

— E-mail: tkuykendall@register-herald.com