Miami Mayor Francis Suarez: Climate change is "not theoretical for us… it's real"
MIAMI – "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan sat down with Miami Mayor Francis Suarez on Sunday.
The two discussed the effects of climate change on his city.
BRENNAN: You and your city have had to come up with a strategy and the one released would spend $3.8 billion over the next few decades to build sea walls, take other measures.
That's quadruple your annual operating budget.
Can you afford what's coming?
SUAREZ: Well, first of all, Margaret, it's not theoretical for us in the city of Miami, it's real.
We deal with it day in and day out year after year, we've been dedicating a tremendous amount of resources, updating our building codes over decades, since 1992, when we had a 200 mile per hour hurricane event called Hurricane Andrew.
Now, our latest challenge, of course, is the water and the heat, as you've said in the prior segment, and our citizens approved right after Hurricane Irma in 2017, which created a four- to six-foot storm surge in our central business district, a plan called Miami Forever.
The basis of the plan is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars that were voted approved that was actually a voter approved tax, and combine them with other funding sources like the state and federal government to be able to upgrade our infrastructure to deal with all the things that are being thrown our way from Mother Nature.
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