[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 76 (Thursday, June 5, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5297-S5300]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  THE SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS BILL

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I don't think I will use the entire 30 
minutes. I wanted to come to the floor of the Senate today to speak 
again about a piece of legislation that we will take up in about an 
hour and 45 minutes. It is a supplemental appropriations bill to 
provide resources and money to help those who have been victims of a 
disaster in our country--especially, and most importantly, the disaster 
that has occurred in our region of the country, the Red River region, 
North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota.
  There are moneys in this bill for other regions as well, and there 
have indeed been other disasters, although none quite as substantial as 
the one that has occurred along the Red River; that is why this bill is 
so critically important to us.
  I was a conferee on the conference committee and, last evening, the 
conference committee reported out the bill, H.R. 1469, an act making 
emergency supplemental appropriations for recovery from natural 
disasters and for overseas peacekeeping, and so on. It is emergency 
supplemental appropriations for recovery from natural disasters. That 
is the purpose for this bill. Congress will consider that, as I 
indicated, in about an hour and 45 minutes.
  I want to make two points today. The first is short, and the second 
is a bit longer. The first is this: Inside this piece of legislation is 
a substantial amount of help, an enormous amount of additional 
resources that will go to a number of regions of the country, 
especially our region, to try to help the victims of the disaster that 
visited our region. We are enormously grateful for that. There are many 
Members of the U.S. Senate, on both sides of the political aisle here, 
who pulled together and rolled up their sleeves and said, ``Let us 
help.'' The help in this bill is substantial. It is very substantial, 
and it will help our region in a manner that I can hardly describe. So 
we are enormously grateful to every Member of this Senate and this 
Congress who helped us get to this point. That is the first point. 
Thanks to everyone who helped.
  The second point is this: The resources inside this legislation are 
only going to be available when the President signs the bill. Time is 
urgent to deal with the needs that exist in our part of the country and 
to respond to the victims of the massive flooding that occurred in the 
Red River Valley. The reason I mention that time is a serious problem 
is because, 14 days ago, the Congress left for the Memorial Day recess 
and left this bill unfinished, and so 14 days have elapsed since that 
time. Now it appears that Congress will pass this bill this afternoon, 
and it contains unrelated, controversial items that almost certainly 
will be vetoed by the President because he has said time and time again 
that if it contains especially the central item dealing with Government 
shutdowns, he will be constrained to veto the bill.
  I rode with President Clinton on Air Force One to Grand Forks Air 
Force Base one morning, and he visited with several thousand people who 
were then living and sleeping in an airplane hangar, a series of four 
hangars, sleeping on cots because they had been evacuated from their 
homes. Two cities, Grand Forks, ND, and East Grand Forks, MN, were 
nearly totally evacuated due to the flood waters that destroyed the two 
communities. Thousands of people were in airplane hangars sleeping on 
cots, wondering what would come next. President Clinton came that day. 
One of the points he made was that the

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Congress and the President certainly will help. He said, ``I hope very 
much that in the construction of a disaster relief bill, Congress will 
not add unrelated amendments, controversial, extraneous amendments that 
will slow down or derail the bill.'' He made that point in the airplane 
hangar to the thousands of people who were there for good reason --
because there is a tendency in Congress to add unrelated things to 
other pieces of legislation. I don't expect that that habit will 
discontinue. But it is unusual for that to happen on a disaster bill. 
It is not the usual course of events for someone to seize a disaster 
bill like this and say, oh, by the way, I have an unrelated issue that 
is very controversial and I think we can force the President to sign it 
by including it in a disaster bill.

  That is not the way most Members of Congress have treated disaster 
bills in the past. Disaster bills deal with disasters. They have 
resources that are needed by victims. The Congress, by and large, has 
decided that they will not toy with or play with or play political 
games with a disaster bill. Yet, today, despite my enormous gratitude 
for all of the wonderful resources that are in this bill, this bill 
contains a couple of--especially one--totally unrelated, very 
controversial items that the President certainly will veto.
  So what happens as a result of that? More delay. Probably another 
week's delay, at least. What happens to the victims of the flood along 
the Red River during that week? They will wait, they will wonder, and 
they will not have answers about their future.
  It is unfair to them to do this. Now, some say--and I read in the 
papers in the last few days--that delay doesn't matter; there is money 
in the pipeline. FEMA has money and they are helping the victims of 
this disaster. Why are you saying that delay is a problem here?
  To anyone who says that, they must be saying it without the facts. 
The facts are this. In Grand Forks, ND, a city with which I am well 
familiar because I have been there many, many times prior to, during, 
and since the flood, about 600 homes were totally and completely 
destroyed as a result of the flood and probably another 800 were 
severely damaged. The people who lived in those 600 homes are not ever 
moving back. The question is, what happens to them? They are going to 
have to describe a new flood plain up in Grand Forks, and those homes 
are going to have to be bought out, and the money will hopefully be 
used to build new homes somewhere else. But there isn't money in the 
pipeline to buy out those homes. The HUD money in this bill is not 
available until the bill is signed. The result is that the city can't 
make decisions until the money is there, and the result is that all of 
those citizens and families, many of whom are now split, wake up in a 
bed that is not theirs, in the home of a stranger that took them in, or 
in a motel, or in a shelter someplace, or in a city 100 miles away, all 
of those people will continue to wait because the city can't give an 
answer because they don't have the money. And the city doesn't have the 
money because this is delayed.
  Now, let me, if I might, go through a couple of charts to describe 
this point. The Grand Forks Herald runs this editorial every day. It is 
a city of 50,000 people, 90 percent of whom were evacuated. I have said 
that 600 homes were totally destroyed and another 800 were severely 
damaged. The Grand Forks Herald says in its editorials, ``10 Days Since 
the Congress Let Us Down.'' That was actually a few days ago. But, 
today, they will have had a different number. Every single day, the 
number of days ``since the Congress let us down.'' The Fargo Forum, 70 
miles down the road, wrote ``Act Now on Flood Relief Bill.'' It is a 
long editorial saying ``don't delay and add extraneous amendments to 
this kind of legislation.'' The Grand Forks Herald, again, wrote: ``11 
Reasons to Pass Federal Disaster Bill Now.'' It describes the urgency 
and the need for the legislation.
  Now, let me, just in case my colleagues don't recall--and I assume 
most of them do--review again how we got to where we are now. In our 
region of the country, we had nearly 10 feet of snow, 3 years worth of 
snow in 3 months. The last quantity of snow was nearly 2 feet--the 
worst blizzard in 50 years, we are told. This illustrates what happened 
during that blizzard. Telephone poles snapped like toothpicks and 
80,000 people were out of power. In many cases, the power wasn't 
restored for some long while, despite the fact that day and night crews 
were working on poles. You can see these poles that were put in. These 
power poles were snapped off like toothpicks and 80,000 people were 
without power. In the middle of that, the Corps of Engineers is 
furiously building dikes because the Weather Service says we will now 
have a severe flood.
  So the snow begins to melt. We have a 500-year flood.
  This is farmland. It doesn't look like it. It looks like an ocean. 
All you can see is the barn and a silo, and water for as far as the eye 
can see.
  This is a poster that shows one of our communities along the Red 
River. All of this is farmland. It now looks like a lake. This is 
before all of the snow had melted. This little Red River became a lake 
nearly 150 miles long and anywhere from 20 to 30 miles wide. That is 
what the citizens of this region face.
  What did that look like? When that came through our town, it looked 
like this--a river that had no bank, a river that became part of the 
community in every home, in every business; Grand Forks, ND, and East 
Grand Forks, MN, totally inundated. In East Grand Forks, 9,000 people 
evacuated, most of them with only the shirts on their backs, totally 
evacuated. In Grand Forks, ND, 90 percent of the 50,000 population had 
to evacuate, many of them with no notice at all.
  So here is what the Grand Forks neighborhoods looked like--all 
throughout the town with water reaching the tops of automobiles.
  In the downtown area we had severe flooding. Then we had a severe 
fire. In the middle of the flood a fire destroyed 11 buildings; parts 
of three blocks in downtown Grand Forks.
  These courageous firefighters fought that fire in some cases working 
only with fire extinguishers in ice cold water up to their waists and 
their chests, suffering hypothermia; and parts of three blocks of 
downtown Grand Forks burned down.
  Here is what it looks like. Here was a block. There is nothing left. 
In the middle of the flood it looks like Dresden.
  Here is another view of downtown Grand Forks flooded and destroyed 
and ravaged by fire; the fire skipped throughout the downtown.
  I might say to the Presiding Officer that this downtown is still 
uninhabited. If you go there today--and I have been there very 
recently--there is almost nothing going on here because there is almost 
nothing left. Every one of these buildings was severely destroyed, and 
the new floodplain in any event when it is drawn, will take a major 
part of the downtown and destroy it further because the buildings will 
be uninhabitable.
  The Grand Forks Herald in the middle of all of this says, What kind 
of flood is this? ``Red Cross Tops 1 Million Meals.'' How bad was that 
disaster: People in shelters, people evacuated all across the region, 
and the Red Cross serving 1 million meals.
  The water is gone. That water stayed a long, long time. The National 
Weather Service predicted a severe flood with a record 49 feet which 
would have been a record of all time on the Red River; 49 feet. But it 
wasn't 49 feet. It was 54 feet. And it inundated everything, and 
literally brought both of those communities to their knees; to a 
standstill.
  What has happened in Grand Forks now? These are some pictures that 
are not quite as clear. But Grand Forks now has streets. When you drive 
down the street, there is only a narrow path to drive down because in 
all of these homes that were destroyed or severely damaged by this 
flood homeowners are ripping all of the things out of these homes that 
need to be taken out; the streets are littered as far as you can see up 
and down the street with just this kind of scene.
  The citizens who go back and take a look at what they have see this. 
This is a home that I stopped at not too many days ago. This is a home 
that is sitting on top of a car. Incidentally, I was on a Coast Guard 
boat. And this is in an area called Lincoln Park. We were on a boat 
through this area. All of these homes were completely under water. It 
took those homes right off the foundation. And this home now comes back 
and sits on top of a car. It and 600 of the neighboring homes are 
destroyed and will never ever be inhabited again.

[[Page S5299]]

  In the same neighborhood, this is what happened when the flood 
inundated the home.
  The reason I am showing these pictures, Mr. President, is some say 
that there is not an urgency here at all. I don't know how many have 
seen what happens in a flood. But here is what Grand Forks residents, 
when they went back to homes that are now uninhabitable, see. They see 
personal belongings that are unrecognizable. They see all of the 
appliances that are destroyed. And they see the job of taking them out 
to the street and putting them on the sidewalk.
  Then we have people now in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks--
thousands of them--who this morning didn't wake up in their homes 
because their homes aren't available to them. They are destroyed. They 
wake up in a neighbor's home, a friend's home, or a stranger's home who 
took them in; a motel, a shelter, in a town 10 miles or 20 miles or 50 
miles away, and in some cases 100 miles away. And they are asking the 
city of Grand Forks, ``What next?'' The city leaders of Grand Forks say 
to them, ``Well, what we are going to do is we are going to help you. 
The Federal Government is going to give us the resources to help you. 
We are going to buy out some of these homes. We are going to help some 
of those businesses restart. We will help some of those folks in 
rebuilding a new home.''
  I talked to a couple down at the Lincoln Park area. They lived in 
their home for 43 years, and had a half-hour notice as the flood waters 
coursed through the dikes and destroyed their entire neighborhood. Now 
they are living in travel trailers, wondering about their future. 
``What next?''
  Every one of those lives is on hold at this moment waiting and 
watching and wondering when Congress will pass the disaster relief 
bill. The answer is, this afternoon.
  That is the good news.
  The bad news is that what Congress passes this afternoon has in it 
unrelated, extraneous amendments put there, in my judgment, only for 
political purposes--only to bait the President; only to say to the 
President, ``Sign this.'' We are going to shove it right down that 
narrow alley and dare him to sign it. The President has already said 
that he won't sign this. This is an amendment that deals with 
Government shutdowns on October 1. It doesn't have merit.
  I don't know. Maybe we should debate that. It ought not be debated on 
a disaster bill. And Members of this Congress know it. If any other 
Member of this Senate was faced with the same circumstance with their 
constituents whose lives are on hold and who are waiting day after day 
after day--if anyone else were in the same situation, they would be 
here to do what I am doing to say this makes no sense.
  Those who have visited my State and the Northern States in our 
country know that we have a very short construction season. We don't 
have 12 months out of the year to rebuild. We have a very short 
construction season. Every single week you lose means that part of your 
community begins to bleed to death. That is why this week and last week 
was so important. It is why next week is so important. It is why I am 
so upset with those who insist on putting unrelated amendments that 
they know will require a veto of this bill.
  Mr. President, we are not the first region of the country to suffer a 
disaster--earthquakes, fires, flood, tornadoes all over this country. 
And in all of the years that I have been in both the U.S. House and the 
U.S. Senate I have been one who said my constituents in North Dakota 
want to be there to help. You are not alone when you suffer a disaster. 
We want to help you. I do not recall a time since I came to the 
Congress when in the middle of a disaster bill people said, ``Oh, by 
the way, we are going to play this like a fiddle. We have an agenda 
here.'' This isn't about victims. It is about politics. I do not recall 
a time when that has happened on a disaster bill. It has happened on 
other bills, and it has happened on both political sides of the aisle--
both Republicans and Democrats. We will probably never change that 
because of the rules of the Senate probably are never going to change. 
But, generally speaking, in most cases Members of the Congress and the 
Senate have not done this with disaster bills.

  We are going to vote on this bill this afternoon. It contains 
critically needed aid for this region of the country.
  There are thousands and thousands of people who are not back in their 
homes. Seven-thousand apartments in Grand Forks, ND, are uninhabitable 
right now. So the 7,000 people in the apartment complexes aren't back 
and won't be back until they get some answer; until some moneys are 
available, until the construction begins, until the money is in the 
pipeline to get that done. And there are those who say, ``Well, gee, 
nothing is being held up. FEMA has money.'' They just do not understand 
it. They are plain flat wrong. Yes. FEMA has money. FEMA has money to 
deal with the day-to-day needs of someone who tomorrow needs money to 
buy a meal, or needs money to rent a hotel room. But FEMA does not have 
the money that gives a community the ability to make the decisions to 
buy out the neighborhoods, or to describe the new floodplain and help 
people rebuild homes and businesses. FEMA doesn't have that money. That 
money is not available. That money is only available when legislation 
of this type passes and is signed by the President of the United 
States.
  So, if I hear one more time anyone in this Senate say, ``Well, gee, 
there is money in the pipeline, no one is disadvantaged,'' I urge them 
to do this. Buy an airplane ticket, and I will go with you. And let's 
go to Grand Forks, ND. There is probably going to be a city council 
meeting the night that you get there, and there will probably be 500 or 
1,000 people there. And every single one of them will ask you the 
question: ``If there is money in the pipeline, show us where. Where is 
the money that will allow us to make the decisions to get on with our 
life? Where is it?'' If anyone who alleges that, again, buy a ticket, 
and come to East Grand Forks, MN, or Grand Forks, ND, or Watertown, SD, 
and tell those citizens where the money is. They won't do that because 
they can't. This are dead flat wrong.
  They are playing a game on this bill, and they ought not play a game 
on this bill. They know it.
  I raised the question yesterday: ``Why don't you pass this bill, and 
then extract the emergency portions of this bill; just the emergency 
portions alone?'' Extract that, and pass it as a separately enrolled 
bill. And if the President vetoes it, then at least enact the emergency 
portions of it so people who have been victims of a flood and fire and 
blizzards are not going to be victimized again by delay.
  But it fell on deaf ears because that is not what people want. There 
are some--not all--who want something more than this. They want 
political points. They want a political issue. I guess they will get 
it. Not from me, but they will get it because they will have a veto in 
a day or two, I suppose. And then people will go home for the weekend 
having not passed the disaster relief, and then come back next week and 
start juggling all of this again. In the meantime, 3 weeks will have 
gone by at a time when it is critical for the people of North Dakota 
and South Dakota and Minnesota to make decisions about their future.
  Mr. President, I regret taking so much time of the Senate today. I 
know other Members wish to speak on other issues. We will also have a 
chance to discuss for 2 hours the disaster bill itself in the middle of 
the afternoon. But I wanted those who watch these proceedings to know 
what the facts are.
  The facts are that there have been thousands--tens of thousands--of 
victims of a natural disaster. That disaster was visited on them 
through no fault of their own; jerked out of their school; pulled out 
of their homes. The homes destroyed; the schools are closed.
  The timing is urgent that this get done.
  Let me end the way I began with two points.
  One, we are enormously grateful for what is in this bill for disaster 
relief. We are enormously troubled by the time and the delay it has 
taken and will take to get this to the President for signature. My hope 
is that very soon all Members will understand the urgency of disaster 
relief for those victims who need it today.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. CAMPBELL addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.

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  (The remarks of Mr. Campbell pertaining to the introduction of S. 837 
are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills 
and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. CAMPBELL. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from Nevada.
  Mr. BRYAN. I thank the Chair. I thank my friend and colleague from 
Colorado for his courtesy in securing my recognition after him.
  (The remarks of Mr. Bryan and Mr. Bond pertaining to the introduction 
of S. 838 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on 
Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair recognizes the Senator from Idaho.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, let me also ask unanimous consent that, 
following my comments, the Senator from Missouri be recognized.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?
  Mr. CRAIG. I will be happy to yield.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. I thank the Senator for his courtesy.

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