Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to call the attention of the House of Representatives to the designation of Frank Bartoli as Greater Pittston Person of the Year by the Sunday Dispatch. He will be honored with a reception on February 2nd, 2003.

Frank is a native of Pittston who came back to the area to tackle the challenge of turning around the Greater Pittston YMCA, of which he is executive director. As the Dispatch stated recently, ``in just over a year he has more than succeeded in helping make the Y a viable Main Street entity again.''

Frank, the son of Robert and Leota Bartoli, grew up in Inkerman and is a graduate of Pittston Area High School and Lock Haven University. He and his wife, the former Eileen Burns, have two children, Brian and Ellie.

When Frank returned to Pittston in August, 2001, the YMCA needed much improvement. It was saddled with debt that was delaying the receipt of grants and other improvements, and building maintenance had become a low priority. With the help of the board of directors, $240,000 in debt has been eliminated.

New treadmills and other equipment improvements have been made, but Frank is most proud of the YMCA's focus on children and families, including expanded day care and preschool, a night of entertainment for pre-teens and the conversion of an old laundry room into a children's room full of toys. Athletics for adults have also been expanded.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to call to the attention of the House of Representatives the well-deserved designation of Frank Bartoli as Greater Pittston Person of the Year, and I commend him for his hard work and dedication.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to call the attention of the House of Representatives to the service to the community of the Arc of Luzerne County, PA, which was founded in 1952 as the Wyoming Valley Council for the Mentally Retarded. The Arc will hold its 50th anniversary celebration on January 15, 2003.

Like many nonprofit organizations, the Arc of Luzerne County started as a small group of parents trying to make a better life for their children. Today, the Arc has become an influential advocacy organization serving all people with mental retardation and related developmental disabilities and their families. The local organization also benefits from its affiliation with the state and national Arc.

Among the many accomplishments of the Arc of Luzerne County is the Community Resource Center, which opened in July 2000 to serve people in six northeastern Pennyslvania counties. Since opening, the center has provided a creative arts program and other community integration activities, as well as up-to-date information and a place for the people it serves to meet with each other and with caregivers and service providers.

The Arc of Luzerne County also has a long history of working to improve the support services offered to children and adults with mental retardation and related developmental disabilities. In addition, the organization provides representative payee services and independent monitoring teams that assess the quality of residential facilities.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to call to the attention of the House of Representatives the half-century of service to the community of the Arc of Luzerne County, and I commend its members for their hard work and dedication.

Mr. Speaker, I rise, of course, in support of this bill today; but I want to call my colleagues' attention to the fact that this has happened a little too often in this House. We allowed unemployment compensation to lapse giving a tremendous Christmas present on December 28 to 800,000 unemployed people in this country. The House of Representatives did not think it was important enough that they could have security.

Now we have allowed this bill to lapse by failing just to schedule a bill that passed the Senate by unanimous consent. Some failure of leadership.

Last year I participated in the disaster insurance bill, and for a full year it lagged where technical defaults and failures of commercial building occurred because we had some attempt by the White House or others to attach on tort reform.

As a Member of Congress, I think our first responsibility is to our constituents. And technically, we have put people in technical default of their mortgages with our failure to act last fall.

Now, I think all of our colleagues will support this bill. They would have supported it last fall. Why did we have to have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the United States receive letters from their insurance carriers that they were in technical default?

I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

MR. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, just for a clarification, the last day of the 107th Congress, the Senate passed a bill, sent it over to the House. We brought it up on unanimous consent, and it was objected to by your side. Just for the record, I wanted to point that out.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, all I can say is I am not aware of what objections were made; but this was perfunctory and should have been performed before we adjourned the last session of the last Congress. It is almost farcical.

Do you realize in my district alone thousands of senior citizens have received letters that they are no longer insured? They are elderly, in their seventies, their 75th, 80th year and they are completely discombobulated with the idea that this Congress would be so

callous as to not respond to their needs. Just as the 800,000 unemployed people are discombobulated today knowing that they do not know when their next unemployment check will come because we failed to extend it before we went home.

Quite frankly, I do not care whether it is a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. I do not think this is a party problem. This is a traffic cop problem for the leadership of this House, and the leadership of this House rests on the Republican control. And I am just calling your attention to it as a Member without partisan feeling.

We cannot afford to allow this to happen in the future. We passed a bill that a bank cannot issue a mortgage on any residence in the United States that is in a flood zone unless they have flood insurance. So technically we were prepared and have for the last 7 or 8 days barred and put into technical default anybody wanting to mortgage or transact residence sales in the United States for the last 7 days. This is ridiculous. This is important.

If you really analyze, we have cost insurance companies, we have cost residences and we have cost constituents across this country millions of dollars and great anxiety for nothing. And all I am urging is let us not have this happen again. This should not be a matter of politics, should not be a matter of who controls the leadership of either side, either body of this House. This is responsible legislation that should have been passed in the last Congress. We failed to.

We have the force also in this legislation for unemployment compensation. It is awfully nice for us to argue over the issues of that question for all this time; but our constituents, 800,000 of them across America, do not know whether or not they will be able to buy groceries this week. That is unacceptable in the United States. And I am only speaking for our average constituents and calling the attention of that to the Members of the House. We cannot continue to allow this to happen.

This should, and I predict will, pass unanimously. I cannot imagine any Member of the House of Representatives that is opposed to giving flood insurance to the American people. So why are we making it a ridiculous thing here 7 days late to come forth with a piece of legislation where there has been a hiatus and technical defaults all over this country, interrupting commerce, interrupting construction, interrupting all kinds of things when our economy is hurting? And we are saying we are being responsible as a body? I think not.

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my chairman and my ranking member for finally putting this piece of legislation in a timely way here before the floor on this first legislative day. I think it is important. I urge all my colleagues on the Republican side and the Democratic side to support this legislation unanimously. It is something important, and it means a great deal to an awful lot of Americans to maintain their homes with some sort of security.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of the National Flood Insurance Program Reauthorization Act that would extend for one year the four basic authorities contained in the National Flood Insurance Act

As many of my colleagues may already know, virtually all residential and commercial mortgage transactions on properties located in flood zones came to a halt on January 1, 2003.

The Senate did attempt to address this problem in the closing days of the 107th Congress. The House, however, regrettably failed to consider the Senate-approved bill before the 107th Congress adjourned.

We must now, as a result, take quick action on this legislation in the House in order to minimize disruptions to homeownership and to protect our already struggling economy.

I am pleased therefore that the leadership has scheduled this legislation for a vote early in the 108th Congress.

This lapse in coverage has already resulted in significant confusion for all parties with an interest in the National Flood Insurance Program. Moving quickly on this bill will help to abate these problems.

From my perspective, it is also of the utmost importance that this bill retroactively reauthorize the National Flood Insurance Program.

In January 1996, the Susquehanna River and its tributaries in Northeastern Pennsylvania exceeded their banks and caused considerable flooding. Mother Nature may cause similar flooding in Pennsylvania or elsewhere before we can complete our work in Washington in the coming days.

I am therefore pleased that this bill would protect homeowners in the interim by making these changes effective as of December 31, 2002.

In closing, we should protect homeowners and businesses from financial losses by not allowing the National Flood Insurance Program to lapse into an extended legal limbo.

Accordingly, Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to respond to the former speaker. I hope he did not want to indicate that I am either opposed to the passage of this legislation or suggest that it will not be very successful or will not be needed. Because I certainly do not want him to leave the floor with that impression.

I just want to make sure the record is very clear. This bill did not have any major objection, to my knowledge, on the floor at all. It was held up because of other tactical reasons for other legislation passed by the Senate that did not want to be considered by the leadership of this House after the Senate passed the bill.

I think that is unacceptable as a policy in this House. I am in favor and I will ask all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, as you do, that we should impose this immediately in the

legislation; and if we have other things to do, let us have our committee hold hearings to find out what has to be done. But we should not penalize, jeopardize and put into such an anxiety state the American people. I just want the record to reflect that.