Sen. Alan Armstrong Explains Permitting Reform | Hot Seat

Hey, good to see you, Scott. Thank you for having me today.

Well, it happened very quickly. You know, Governor Stitt, who I think a lot of and think he's been a very courageous leader, had called me and said, 'Hey, are you interested in doing this?' Or he actually called me and asked me to come to Oklahoma City and meet him in his office. And I didn't really have an idea what that might be about. But so he asked me if I would be willing to do that and I said I haven't given him much thought but I'm sure I can find somebody a lot better to help take the role. So let me work with you and try to find somebody. And he said well that wasn't really the question I asked you. And so, anyway, that was about 3 weeks before then I got a call from him on a Saturday saying, 'Can you meet me in Florida tomorrow and meet with President Trump?' And so that was a Sunday meeting. And then he announced that on Monday and I got sworn in on Tuesday morning and took a vote about five minutes later. So it all went pretty fast there in that last two or three days.

Yeah, you know, permitting reform, anybody that wants to build anything in this country today, anything of significance, is going to come up against some difficult permitting. You know, we always use the term red tape and bureaucracy and all the things that we don't like about our government. But it's gone beyond that. It's gone to just be a process of litigation. And so anybody that tries to get anything built these days and we've kind of been like a frog in a boiling pot in terms we've just kind of gotten used to it. It's just gotten worse and worse and worse and we've just kind of gotten used to it and not realizing that we're up against other countries that don't have that incredible impediment and constraint on being able to get things built. And in an environment that's going to go faster and faster as a country and our ability to be competitive with the rest of the world, particularly China, we cannot sit and have inefficient means that don't do anything to actually protect the environment. They just purely make a big fight. They make money for a lot of the big NGOs, the big non-governmental organizations, the Sierra Clubs of the world that frankly make money off of just stopping things and making villains out of people that are trying to get things built. And our country was great because we have great infrastructure in our country and we've always been great builders. We are very rapidly losing that advantage as a country and it's causing our utility bills to go higher in areas. It's causing us to be slower and slower at being able to build things. And again, if that was actually resulting in a better environment and better environmental conditions, then I'd say, 'Okay, fine. Well, there's some positive to that.' That is not what's happening. It is just pure simple litigation and process that slows everything down. So Oklahomans, you know, I hear it from farmers in terms of things they have to deal with on EPA and Clean Water Act issues that stand in the way of good progress on their part and certainly getting things built in our country today is a real challenge. So, you know, it's easy to say, 'Well, I don't want it in my backyard.' But that's not how our country became great and we have to continue to be builders in this country if we're going to remain as great. And it's not going to happen next year, not going to even have next year after that. But when a person like myself looks at my four-year-old grandson and kind of keeps that as my compass about keeping our country great, we cannot afford to just let it be so incredibly expensive and difficult to get things built in our country any longer.