[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Page 6669]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    WATER RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT ACT

  Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I wish to continue and again thank the 
majority leader for his kind comments and assure him I am working with 
the Republican leadership as well to try to find a way forward to 
minimize the impact on many businesses and homeowners who will be 
negatively affected by the new requirements of the Federal flood 
insurance program.
  I have an amendment which has been filed. It is amendment No. 888. I 
will be offering it for myself and Senator Vitter. Senator Schumer and 
Senator Lautenberg are also cosponsors of this amendment. Hopefully we 
can get a vote. I do not mind trying to meet the 60-vote threshold. I 
understand that would be a requirement should we be able to move to a 
vote next week on this amendment.
  We will be working very hard over the weekend to get additional 
cosponsors on the first amendment I filed, which had a multimillion-
dollar cost to it. We had 62 people who had committed to vote. So we 
have a strong network of Senators, Republicans and Democrats, who are 
very supportive of the effort Senator Vitter and I are leading to try 
to mitigate some of the harshest provisions of this bill that passed 
last year. The bill never was voted on in this Chamber. It came out of 
the Banking Committee. A separate bill came out of the House with a 
strong bipartisan vote. Then what happened was both bills never went to 
a formal conference. It got pushed inside of a larger bill. A few 
things did not get pushed in the correct way, at least from the 
perspective of those of us who believe that, yes, our flood insurance 
program should be cost-effective, should be affordable, and should not 
run at deficit levels any longer. But there are certain ways to do that 
that are more equitable and fair than others. So my amendment now--we 
have worked all throughout the day. I thank Senator Crapo. Senator 
Johnson's staff has been helpful as well. We are not quite there yet, 
but we are working on a fix to delay the implementation of some of 
these rate increases to give our communities--this is not just for 
Louisiana. Texas is affected, Florida is affected, the east coast is 
affected. California is No. 3 in terms of policies that are related to 
flood insurance.
  It will give us some time to give our people a little bit more 
breathing room until we can get our levees constructed, until this new 
mapping can be put into place, as not to shock homeowners and owners of 
commercial real estate with these very high premiums we hope to be able 
to avoid.
  Again, it is amendment No. 888. There is no score attached to it. We 
will accept a 60-vote threshold. I hope my colleagues will look at 
this. I thank Senator Vitter for his leadership. It is a Landrieu-
Vitter amendment, again with Senator Schumer and Senator Lautenberg and 
their staffs giving us plenty of help and assistance throughout the 
day.
  We will work on it over the weekend. Hopefully, we can come to a 
final resolution early next week, and then get to the passage of the 
WRDA bill which is so extremely important to people in Louisiana. I am 
very grateful for Senator Boxer's leadership. Senator Vitter is the 
ranking member. This bill came out of the EPW Committee with a fairly 
strong bipartisan and overwhelming vote.
  We have millions of dollars of projects that are authorized in this 
bill. We have corps reform. It is important for us to be able to build 
our levees more quickly, more efficiently, to avoid some of the 
terrible devastation that has happened.
  It is very important to get the WRDA bill passed. I am going to ask 
any colleagues, if you can join in helping on this flood insurance 
bill, please do. I look forward to working with people over the weekend 
on it.
  I yield the floor.

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