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Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Madam President, I have come to the Senate floor time and again and said to my colleagues that disaster relief funding is absolutely urgently needed. Today, the future of government funding is imperiled right now in the House, and the future of disaster funding is still unknown in the Senate.

And let me be clear, there are families across America, in Vermont, and in communities impacted by natural disasters all across our country that need us to help, and they can't recover without us. FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund is running out of money, forcing FEMA to function on what is essentially reserve funding.

This is no fault of FEMA's. It is all a result of the catastrophic weather events that have been occurring rapidly, frequently, throughout our country and in Vermont.

This past year and a half has brought brutal floods in Vermont and terrible fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes across our country.

Louisiana right now is bracing for the worst as Hurricane Francine moves onshore, and our prayers in Vermont are with the people of Louisiana. We know their heartbreak and their pain right now.

These communities--and it is especially the case with rural communities--cannot weather these storms alone. Some of those that are hardest hit are being financially destroyed. It is a function of the effects of climate change, and those communities don't have the resources to dig out, make repairs, and rebuild in the resilient way required for the future.

They can't handle a 100-year flood, and many in Vermont have had two 100-year floods in a year, in some towns even three in 12 or 13 months.

It is very important that disaster aid be flexible. We can't expect our communities--and it is from Vermont to Mississippi to Hawaii--we can't expect that those who are ravaged by disaster to fight this fight alone. The entire country has been hammered by climate change and by these weather events.

We need, in addition to the supplemental funding for the Disaster Relief Fund for FEMA, we need flexible funding which is available through the Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program. The CDBGDR Program is a great example of how aid can be controlled by communities because there is so much more flexibility with that fund.

Our Senator Schatz of Hawaii, as chair of our Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, is leading the push for this funding, and I join him in that effort.

Also, the experience I have had visiting communities, visiting farms, visiting businesses, and visiting Vermont homeowners immediately following our State's flooding has given me, No. 1, enormous respect for Administrator Criswell. She was right there after the flood along with her wonderful FEMA staff doing everything they could to help communities.

But once the immediate event has come and gone and the repair and recovery has to start, it is going to take, oftentimes, a year or more for communities to repair bridges, for families to get an answer on whether they do or don't get a buyout, for farms to get what meager relief may be available. And what we have seen is that at that point, the centralization of decision-making authority and responsibility with various FEMA offices located around the country and the FEMA office in charge of Vermont that has to make these decisions about yes or no on moving forward on a bridge or a buyout--things that are really crucially important to Vermonters, to our local governments, to our homeowners--is in Puerto Rico.

And what I have seen is that the energy and the effort and the resources and the talent is at the local level. So if you are on the selectboard in Lyndonville, you have got the responsibility to your voters to get that bridge fixed. You actually know who the best contractors are. You know how to get it done. But the way it works right now, those decisions about moving forward on a recovery project are made in a distant location.

I have talked to many of my colleagues about a similar aftermath of the original event: The immediate aid is provided, but then when you are talking about a contract, you are talking about implementation, the reality is we have to have, in my view, much more local control, much more local responsibility, and much more local capacity with the resources that are available through FEMA. It means the decisions will be made sooner, the work will be done in a more cost-effective and efficient way.

I raise that because I am talking to colleagues who have had similar experiences, some in States that are Republican-led, some Democratic- led. It really doesn't matter. It is about trying to get that authority at the local level so that the local people--whether it is Mississippi or Vermont--have much more authority, responsibility, and capacity to carry out those very, very needed repairs.

So that will be something I will be inviting my colleagues to work with me on.

This last summer, I spent a good deal of time traveling to the flooded communities--and there are too many of them in Vermont--to see what has happened to our homes, our small businesses and farms, to roads and bridges that were washed out. And folks across Vermont--in places like Moretown and Plainfield and Barre and Barnet, St. Johnsbury, Peacham, Lyndonville, and Hardwick--are all reeling from what has happened. They are pulling together; they are coming back. Neighbors are helping neighbors, but it is not going to get done unless we provide the supplemental funding with the disaster relief fund that is essential to the well-being of Vermonters, as well as the well-being of folks who have suffered from these catastrophic weather events across the country.

Vermont will hang in, but we do need help. And we are ready, as we always have been, to help others.

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