[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 7 (Tuesday, January 22, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S36-S38]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HURRICANE SANDY
Ms. LANDRIEU. Madam President, I came to the floor this afternoon to
speak briefly about Hurricane Sandy and what the Senate and the House
could and should be doing to help the survivors of this catastrophic
disaster that occurred now over 3 months ago on the northeast coast. We
from Louisiana are very familiar, unfortunately, with disasters. We
have had quite a number over the past several years. Unfortunately, I
have become an expert on disasters. I don't want to be, but I am
becoming one as chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Committee and as a leader from Louisiana. All of us, whether we are
school board members, city council members, mayors, parish officials or
Governors from Louisiana, are becoming experts on disasters because we
are having a lot of them.
So I came to the floor to say just a few things this afternoon about
Hurricane Sandy. First, I wish to begin by saying the people of the
Northeast--and they don't need me to tell them this--have a wonderfully
strong delegation in the Senate, Senators Schumer, Gillibrand,
Menendez, and Lautenberg. Of course, in Maryland--though we don't hear
much about Maryland, there were one or two small counties that were
terribly affected in Maryland--and Senator Cardin and Senator Mikulski
have been, day in and day out, working with me and with many others, of
course, trying to fashion a robust and smart response to the disaster
on the East Coast.
We want it to be smart because the taxpayers don't want to waste
money on things that don't work. Of course, the survivors want it to be
smart because they need us to do our best work now. We can't be late
and sloppy and bureaucratic. They have churches to rebuild and faith-
based organizations to get back up and running. There are schools and
libraries and, most importantly, of course, their homes and their
businesses. So this is very important work.
It has been difficult because there are many different philosophies
about how to tackle this. I have made my positions fairly clear on
certain aspects such as offsets, et cetera. But today I wanted to come
to the floor to just acknowledge the extraordinary work of the
delegation--led in large measure by Senator Schumer--of Members who
have been absolutely rolling up their sleeves at every meeting and
trying to build bipartisan support, which we have to do in the Senate.
The House can sometimes get away with sending things over here with
only the Republicans voting for it and no Democrats, but over here we
can't get anything done unless it is done with all of us together. It
is just a different set of rules in the Senate, so we have had to work
very hard.
Senators Schumer and Gillibrand and other Members worked very hard to
get together the necessary votes to get that $60 billion out of here a
couple weeks ago. The House, of course, unfortunately, stripped away
some provisions but, happily--happily--they left some of the best
reforms we have been able to think of in the last 4 or 5 years in the
bill, and that is what I wish to talk about today.
I am a big believer in sending aid to the people in America who need
it. We send a lot of aid overseas, and we will sure send a lot of aid
when we rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq, but I am a real big believer in
sending aid to our own taxpayers when their homes are flooded or
tornadoes have taken out their area or fires have raged out of control
or major storms have hit their area. I am a big believer that when
people pay taxes all their life--middle-class families as well as the
poor and the working poor, as well as the wealthy, who pay a lot of
taxes--they deserve their government to respond when they are at a very
dark moment. That is what is happening on the east coast, and these
constituents and citizens of ours could not get this help. They need it
more quickly.
We are moving as fast as we can--not fast enough for this Senator,
but hopefully we can get this vote and this bill to the President's
desk. I know President Obama will be happy to sign this and is eager to
sign it. I wish to also say thank you to President Obama for his strong
support of a robust supplemental and to say how proud I am to have
worked with his Cabinet, many of whom are involved in this recovery,
and particularly the Secretary of HUD, who is probably one of the most
able leaders. All the Cabinet members are very able, but the Secretary
of HUD is particularly knowledgeable about rebuilding in a more
coordinated fashion because he actually got to practice on us down in
the gulf coast. We were kind of like the guinea pigs. Hopefully, we
have worked out a lot of the problems and we can take all the best
practices and lessons learned.
But Shaun Donovan will do a great job leading that effort on the east
coast, I have no doubt, with both a very strong Democratic Governor and
a very strong Republican Governor--Governor Christie and Governor Cuomo
in that area--along with Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Cory Booker and so
many other small-town officials involved in the recovery. They will
have a great friend and a knowledgeable and reliable partner in
Secretary of HUD Shaun Donovan.
But let me go into just a few things we were able to redesign,
thinking that our citizens and our constituents want government to be
leaner. They want government, most importantly, to be smarter and more
efficient, and I could not agree more. We have tried, at least in the
disaster recovery--when the response to Katrina and Rita was such a
disaster itself--to reshape some of this and make it better and
smarter. So we put some very effective and smartly designed programs
into the Sandy supplemental.
I want to begin by thanking my friend and colleague from the State of
Mississippi, Senator Cochran, who joined me in introducing the Disaster
Recovery Act in 2011 that contained many of these reforms. Our States
have endured the same series of disasters and bureaucratic roadblocks
to recovery over the past eight years, and we are determined to prevent
communities in the northeast from experiencing the same inefficiency
and waste. His contributions to the Gulf Coast's recovery and the
development of this legislation have been tremendous, and I am grateful
for his partnership in this endeavor.
I also wish to thank my House colleagues, particularly Congressman
Shuster, Congressman Rahall, Congressman Denham, Delegate Holmes-
Norton, Congressman Mica, who is the outgoing chair of the committee
over there and was so instrumental in helping to fashion some of this,
Congresswoman Slaughter, Congresswoman Lowey, Congressman Alexander and
Congressman Richmond. In particular,
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Cedric Richmond, who is from Louisiana and a dear friend, along with
Congressman Alexander, from my home State, were very instrumental in
helping their colleagues--one is a Republican, one is a Democrat--kind
of understand why it is important to have these reforms stay in the
bill, and they were successful. I am very grateful to them for that.
One of the things from the several lists of things that were in this
bill--and that I want to put into the Record--I will just go over and
highlight briefly.
No. 1, in the Sandy supplemental, it will reauthorize two expired
pilot programs from the post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act
that allowed FEMA to repair rental units as a cost-effective temporary
housing alternative to trailers and mobile homes and to utilize
expedited debris removal procedures.
This might not seem very interesting to people, unless you and your
family are looking at living in an 8-by-16 or 8-by-24 trailer for the
next 6 months. Then you are very interested. In the old days, when
Katrina happened, all people were given were trailers and, in some
instances, with formaldehyde in them, which made for a lovely and very
healthy way to live for 6 months. We don't want to go over the
nightmares of what happened after Katrina and Rita, but we decided we
had to give our citizens some other options besides trailers. So if
something would happen in Massachusetts, Madam President, your Governor
and your local officials could come together and maybe be a little bit
creative in thinking about some rental repairs, where maybe people
could move into some of the blighted properties. That would also help
with the blight. Instead of spending $120,000 per trailer, maybe we
could do a little investing in some blight reduction and, at the same
time, giving people a temporary place to live. So that is smart. I
think taxpayers appreciate it when we try to spend their money in a
wiser, built-to-last kind of way. That is what the Sandy supplemental
allows.
It also allows the State to draw down a portion of its hazard
mitigation funds from FEMA in order to leverage mitigation
opportunities earlier in the reconstruction process. In the old days,
it would take 18 to 36 months for funding to become available, in some
instances, to rebuild a school. That is too long. Can you imagine a
community going 3 years without even getting their school started?
I realize sometimes it takes a long time to build things, but you
don't want to wait 3 years before you start. So the way we do it now,
without spending any more money, is just allowing the Federal
Government to push out some of the front money to the locals so they
can get started on mitigation projects much sooner. So that is a very
smart reform that is included.
In addition, we also provide grants on the basis of reliable fixed
estimates for rebuilding damaged infrastructure and facilities and
expedited removal of storm debris. This approach will be faster,
cheaper, and more effective. The Public assistance program as currently
designed may be one of the most dysfunctional programs in the entire
Federal Government and will not work for this disaster. Under the
current approach, initial damage estimates are often incomplete.
Projects must be reversioned multiple times. Decisions are often not
made in writing. Frequent staff turnover leads to decision reversals.
Hundreds of meetings result in incalculable administrative waste. And
it can take years for even a small project to be completed. And let me
just put this in English.
What this means is in the old days when Katrina hit--and people are
not going to believe it when I say this, but it is true, and I will put
this in the Record so people can go find it. But in the old days we
would have to take measurements and pictures of a tree to determine how
wide the branch was because if it was more than 3 inches you got
reimbursed, and if it was less than that you didn't. We would have to
go take pictures of trees where the debris came down to try to get the
paperwork necessary for the reimbursement. Those days are hopefully
over with.
We will now do kind of an estimate just like any normal, rational
person would do. You know from past storms how much debris is usually
there. You could sort of measure that. There are ways--not just
subjective but objective, like geospatial modeling, without having to
take pictures of limbs on trees and measure them individually--which is
a complete waste of time and wholly irrational and, of course,
survivors who are standing there without a house are wondering why
government officials are going around taking pictures of shrubs. So we
need to move past that. Hopefully, we will with some of this
legislation.
No. 4 codifies temporary legislative measures that were enacted to
facilitate smarter recovery, including third-party arbitration,
eliminating penalties on alternate projects, and consolidating
facilities into a single project. This was my most important thing, and
I would like to take a minute to explain it to everyone.
A while after Katrina, which was a nightmare, I kept wondering why
these project worksheets were never getting settled. We would send
thousands of these worksheets to the Federal Government and say: This
was our library. We estimate it will cost $5 million to rebuild it.
The Federal Government would say: No, we think it is $2.5 million.
That is all we owe you.
So I said: I can understand there could be a disagreement. Who
resolves it? No one. What do you mean, no one? No one. It just keeps
going around and around, and we just keep sending paper back.
I said: Is there any timeline for the resolution? No. I said: Is
there any third-party arbitrator? No. So we put in a third-party
arbitrator so that if a project is disagreed to by the locals about
what was there, what it looked like, how they should rebuild it, we now
have a rational way to step in and get a decision, and it is
nonnegotiable. You can't appeal it. But it is better than not having a
decision. The local governments really support this, and I am happy we
could get that done.
In addition--this was one of my favorites--everyone would run around
giving press conferences about how we were going to build smarter and
stronger and better, et cetera. Except when we looked into the law and
actually read the law, it was illegal. If you tried to move a police
station like 10 feet to get it out of the way of the river, or the land
had sunk and you wanted to move it to higher ground, you would actually
be penalized 25 percent because it became an alternate project since it
wasn't exactly the same. So I said: We don't want to build the exact
same thing. That was the problem to begin with. Some of our buildings
were in places they shouldn't have been. Some of our buildings were
built with materials we should never have used. So why are we having to
rebuild the same old thing?
Well, that was because that was what the law said. I said: Well, the
law needs to be changed, and we are changing it.
So I hope people, while they fuss at government--and I know we have a
lot to do to get things straight--know a lot of thought has gone into
some of these reforms, and they are based on real-life experiences on
what communities have gone through. Hopefully, the Northeast will
benefit from this as we go forward.
Let me just put a few more things in the Record. No. 5 allows
families to use FEMA individual assistance for childcare expenses.
Here is another thing we found. We do depend on individual citizens
to rebuild their communities. Trust me. The Federal Government may send
a lot of money, but they didn't gut houses. Do you know who gutted
houses? The churches helped, the volunteers helped, and seniors. Many
veterans who had fought the war in the ``greatest generation,'' they,
at 80 years old, put on gloves and overalls and gutted their own
houses.
I mean take your house down to the studs. It is a hard thing to do.
Not only is it physically hard, it is emotionally devastating. The
Federal Government did not come in and gut people's houses. We had to
gut our houses by ourselves.
After we sorted our debris by EPA requirements and dragged it out to
the sidewalk and made sure it didn't touch a part of the lawn--because
if it did, they couldn't pick it up because they can't go on private
property to pick up debris. It is a nightmare. But this is going to be
alleviated because parents and grandparents need to get back to gut
their homes. They have to have a
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place for their kids to go that is safe. You can't have children
running around in dangerous places. So people aren't thinking about
this in a recovery, but schools have to be up and running, and you
really should be able to use some of this money for daycare so the
parents can work. Some of them quit their jobs to rebuild their homes.
They lived off their savings and they went back to work. It is a tough
situation.
But I am happy, and I want to thank Mark Shriver, Save the Children,
and the National Commission on Children and Disasters who led this
initiative trying to help us focus on the storms of the future, what we
could do better to help children to make sure their needs are cared
for. We think about adults, but, of course, most of these families have
kids, sometimes young children. So we have done a little bit. I wish we
could have done more, but we negotiated the best we could, and at least
we got the childcare provision in.
It reduces bureaucratic waste by eliminating duplicative agency
reviews for the same project and the same set of laws governing
environmental, historic preservation, and benefit-cost requirements. It
also helps the environment by incentivizing recycling of debris. So if
we can find a way to recycle it, then people get paid a little bit more
as opposed to just throwing it in the landfills. We think that will be
a good opportunity to try to promote some good technologies for
recycling. And--this is very important--it also corrects a gap in
current law that prohibited tribal governments from requesting Federal
assistance. They were completely prohibited under the former law.
Really, as a matter of fair policy and the Federal law, tribes should
be able to request some assistance as well, and that was corrected in
this piece of legislation.
It also, finally, eliminates a perverse incentive in the law to use
high-priced contract labor for emergency work instead of local
government employees, such as firefighters and police officers, which
should save the Federal Government millions of dollars.
In closing, I want to thank all of the different organizations that
helped to pass this: the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National League
of Cities, the National Association of County Organizations,
International Association of Emergency Managers, International
Association of Firefighters, International Association of Fire Chiefs,
and the Association of State Floodplain Managers.
This is not a subject that is always fun to talk about because when
you are talking about it, it is a lot of suffering that is going on,
whether it is Joplin, MO, or Gulfport, MS, or New Orleans, LA, or New
York, NY, or the boardwalk in New Jersey. And many of those not-so-
small beach communities are very highly populated. There is a lot of
suffering. But it is important for us to try, when we can, when we see
that the response is not what it should be, to take the time to push
out some reforms, to fix what we can fix so that the $60 billion that I
hope we will send to them can be used smartly, quickly, and
efficiently.
I am living proof of a Senator who has had to literally help lead the
rebuilding of the gulf coast, along with my friends from Texas,
Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. My hometown is New Orleans. My
brother is now the mayor, and he is rebuilding that city every day.
Eighty percent of the residential communities on the east bank were
destroyed completely. That would be like 80 percent of the District of
Columbia but not Anacostia, but 80 percent--which would be the whole
other side of DC on this side of the river--being uninhabitable. It is
hard for people to get their head around that scale. I think
Massachusetts has experienced some of these storms. But the scale and
scope of the loss is just hard to get your head around. Even though it
is not on the 5 o'clock news or the 6 o'clock news or 10 o'clock news
or now 24-hour news, it is still happening. So this money and these
reforms are important.
So I hope the Senate will act quickly this week. We may have to take
up a few amendments from the minority. We have already had the debate
about offsets, and we have decided that in the middle of the battle we
don't have to argue about who is going to pay for the bullets. We need
to go ahead and send the money, and we will figure out how to pay for
it later. We are going to pay for it. It is not a question of whether
it is going to be repaid. It will be paid for. We should not be arguing
about that while the water is rising or while people are gutting their
homes or worshiping in tents along the beach. They need their churches
back, they need their communities back, and we need to send them money
and the smarter tools to help them with the recovery.
So I again thank so many colleagues for helping with this,
particularly Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins, who led a lot of
these efforts through their leadership of the Homeland Security
Committee and spent a significant amount of time along with their staff
reviewing and helping to improve this legislation, as well as my
colleagues on the Appropriations Committee on Homeland Security.
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