WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Rep Bill Delahunt today announced the approval for several local projects in the FY09 Omnibus Appropriations bill that President Obama signed today.   

“Our coastal waters are important to the health and economic well-being of our region, Delahunt said.   “Our local communities are taking a leadership role in promoting the safe and sustainable use of our coastal waters.”

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2009 will fund federal agency operations for Fiscal Year 2009.  It includes the following appropriations bills: Agriculture, Commerce-Justice-State, Energy-Water, Foreign Operations, Interior, Labor-Health and Human Services-Education, Legislative Branch, Transportation-Treasury, and Veterans Administration-Housing and Urban Development. 

Federal assistance in the omnibus bill for the South Shore, Cape Cod and the Islands includes:

• $951,000 for the Hull Municipal Light Plant to develop an offshore wind farm. The funds will be used to help the Town of Hull plan and develop an offshore wind farm to provide affordably priced renewable energy to town residents. The Municipal Light Plant is a public utility and widely respected for involving the community in the development of electricity from renewable sources. When completed, the project will enable the town to receive close to 100% of its electricity from renewable sources.  Delahunt has cited Hull’s as a national model for wind energy development and has urged other local communities to follow its example.

• $951,000 for the Massachusetts Marine Renewable Energy Center, a partnership with UMass, Nantucket and Edgartown to develop offshore marine renewable energy. This project will create an in-ocean test site and renewable energy lab to research, demonstrate and validate marine renewable energy technologies. The site and lab will lower the research and development costs to companies developing and manufacturing these technologies, thus making it easier for these companies to commercialize products and provide a national training site for clean energy engineers and technicians. The power would be used by the local communities to meet their renewable energy needs.   It would be the first pre-approved in ocean test site constructed in the United States and is modeled after a similar project in Scotland.

• $367,000 for maintenance dredging of Aunt Lydia’s Cove, Chatham. The funding would be used for the dredging of the navigation channel in Chatham in order to provide safe access to mariners and the United States Coast Guard. The port is one of the largest commercial fishing harbors in New England.   The Coast Guard uses this harbor to patrol and provide search and rescue to the back side of Cape Cod
  

• $1.75 million for the Cape Cod National Seashore to acquire the North of Highland Campground. Funding for this project would be used to complete the acquisition of the 57 acre North of Highland Campground in Truro for inclusion in the Cape Cod National Seashore.   Delahunt credited Senator Edward Kennedy for his sustained advocacy of the project.

• $500,000 for the Right Whale Entanglement Program at the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies. The funding will be used to continue the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) large marine mammal disentanglement program. This is a long standing and critical component of the overall efforts to preserve and protect endangered marine mammals especially the most crtically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.

• $10,717,000 for maintenance dredging of the Cape Cod Canal.

To view a complete list of projects funded in the FY'09 Omnibus bill, please click here. (Note: All of the projects included in the House version, as described in the press release dated Feb. 25, 2009, were included in the final bill that was passed into law.)

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