The White House released a series of videos on Monday to bring attention to failing infrastructure in Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state of Kentucky in an effort to gather support for President Biden’s infrastructure bill.
As the Lexington Herald-Leader reports, the videos focused on Eastern Kentucky residents struggling to get access to broadband and clean drinking water.
One resident named BarbiAnn Maynard from Martin County, a clean water activist, showed how she and many residents in her area use only bottled water for their daily needs due to fear of the quality of tap water available to them.
“This water disgusts me. I’m afraid of this water,” Maynard says in the video, pointing to her sink faucet. Maynard describes her local water system as being “on the edge of total collapse.”
Maynard also pointed out failing roads that were hollowed out by coal mining activity.
“The coal mines mined under our roads so there’s hollow spots. There was no enforcement of the weight limit so they let the trucks drive overloaded on our roads,” Maynard explains. In the video, Maynard drives past a large sign positioned on a destroyed bridge that reads, “China build us a bridge.”
“There’s about 25 houses on the other side of that road and they have no bridge, no access in or out,” Maynard said.
“People talk about ‘Eastern Kentucky is poor and they don’t really have anything,’” Maynard says. “Well, how are we ever going to have anything if our government won’t invest in our infrastructure?”
McConnell has signaled some support for a bipartisan-led infrastructure package that have been proposed but he has maintained that stopping Biden’s agenda is his top priority.
Last week, Senate GOP aides told The Hill that McConnell was seeking to split Biden from progressives by showing some support for a bipartisan bill as long as it focused on traditional infrastructure.