In Iowa, Rick Santorum talks coal, water pollution - Video, Transcript

Rick Santorum fielded a voter’s question about water pollution at a December 31, 2011 New Years Eve rally in Ottumwa, Iowa. Here’s video and transcript documenting what the former Senator from Pennsylvania and 2012 Republican presidential candidate had to say on the issue:

Voter: I’m concerned with a candidate who has some kind of an environmental policy.

60 miles east of here is a town in Middletown, Iowa, we have an army ammunitions plant that manufactured nuclear weapons and large ammunition, and 207 test wells out of 208 there are contaminated with ground pollution.

An 18-month environmental cleanup has now turned into a cleanup that’s supposed to last until 1946 and could be ongoing from that.

I’m curious what we’re going to do, because we only have so much water, and that water has to take care of all us.

And I’m concerned we’re already at the point of too little too late.

What are we going to do protect our water resources in this country?

Rick Santorum: I must admit, one of the things I learned in politics a long time ago, when you don’t know the answer to a question, you admit it and you don’t keep talking and prove to people you don’t know the answer.

I don’t that specific, this is the first I’ve heard of this situation and I apologize, so I can’t really comment on what’s happening there.

I can say that one of things I’m proud of, I happened to have worked on a bill in 2006 that broke a logjam between, not Democrats and Republicans, but the East and the West having to do with reclamation of abandoned coal mines, and the tremendous amounts of groundwater and other pollution that was coming from these abandoned mines.

Most of the coal mining as you know is now done in the Western states and the way that abandoned mine reclamation is funded, it’s based, it’s funded on a tax on coal from the state from which it comes.

Well obviously most of the abandoned mines are not in the West, they’re in the East.

And yet, all the tax revenue now is being raised in the West, and so, of course the Western producers didn’t want to send their money East, they wanted to use it to clean up their own situation or enhance the environment in that area, and that was a logjam for a long, long time.

But I worked with Mike Enzi and the Senator from Wyoming and we put together a comprehensive bill that now we unlock that monies and now a lot of that Western revenue is going to come and cleanup a tremendous amount of water in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and other place there was a lot of coal mining, which there is not as much today.

So if you’re looking for someone with a record of being able to work not just across party lines, but across national lines to get things done, we were able to do that.