James Oberstar

Mr. OBERSTAR

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks on the bill H.R. 2830, the Coast Guard Reauthorization Act.

Mr. OBERSTAR

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise in strong support of H.R. 2830, the Coast Guard Authorization Act that includes critical provisions to strengthen the U.S. Coast Guard. It's been since 2004, the last time we actually moved through House and Senate and conference a Coast Guard authorization bill, not for lack of effort. In the 109th Congress in 2005 and 2006 the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, under then Chairman Don Young, a strong advocate, admirer of and one who embraces the U.S. Coast Guard, we moved the bill through committee, and we brought it to the House in 2006. Unfortunately, we were not able to reach conference with the other body, but not for lack of effort. And so that bipartisan initiative was rekindled last year as the committee picked up the pieces and incorporated the work of previous Congresses and moved forward with a very expansive Coast Guard authorization bill. Toward that purpose, I express my deepest appreciation for the chairmanship of the subcommittee, under Elijah Cummings, the Member from Baltimore, who has embraced his responsibility and duty and embraced the Coast Guard and mastered the subject matter. And our ranking member on that Coast Guard Subcommittee, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. LaTourette) who, in his ever thoughtful, judicious, thorough manner, similarly has mastered the subject matter. He is a master of detail, and has brought many thoughtful recommendations to the legislation that is before us. And I thank the gentleman for his splendid cooperation, that of the ranking member of the full committee, Mr. Mica, who has ceded the floor responsibilities to Mr. LaTourette. Mr. Mica, representing the State of Florida, a State that is intimately related with, to, dependent upon, and grateful to the Coast Guard for its services. In this bill, we extend, we first of all, increase personnel for the U.S. Coast Guard. In my first year in Congress, 1975, I served on the Coast Guard Subcommittee and subsequently, all through to 1995, when the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, which included Coast Guard, was dissolved and the responsibilities of the Coast Guard transferred over to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure where I continued to work on Coast Guard issues. From 1975, Coast Guard personnel authorization was at 39,000. We added 27 new functions, new responsibilities, various Congresses, various presidents over the years, without increasing substantially Coast Guard personnel. We do that in this legislation. We add 1,500 military personnel. We increase the total strength of the Coast Guard to 47,000 to adequately serve the needs of the clear dual responsibilities of the Coast Guard, safety, which is search and rescue, and buoy tending and navigation aids and so on, and the security responsibility in the Coast Guard in the era of homeland security. There will be no argument or no, how shall I say, excuse in the future that the Coast Guard doesn't have sufficient personnel so they have to be a multi-mission agency. We're going to assure that they have adequate personnel through this authorization and subsequent funding of it to carry out all of their civil responsibilities. We extend benefits to Coast Guard personnel, reimburse them for medical-related travel for members assigned to remote locations. We grant access to Armed Forces retirement home systems to the Coast Guard veterans. We allow Coast Guard in this legislation to provide authorization for personnel who work in support of a declaration of a major disaster or emergency issued by the President to retain up to a total of 90 days of accrued leave compared to only 60 days currently. We implement the administration's proposal initiated by the Coast Guard to reorganize the Coast Guard. As they propose in their plan in this legislation, we provide authorization that eliminates two area commands established by law and the Coast Guard chief of staff position and replace those with four vice admirals, deputy commandant for mission support, deputy commandant for national operations and policy, the commander for force readiness command and the commander for the operations command, and we promote, in this legislation, the vice commandant to full admiral. The legislation strengthens substantially fishing vessel safety, the most dangerous occupation in the United States, improving the training, construction, and enforcement standards for commercial fishing vessels; double hull around fuel bunker tanks on new construction of U.S. vessels. Any vessel carrying more than 600 cubic meters of oil will have double hulls around their fuel tanks to prevent the disastrous consequences such as the COSCO BUSAN, which Chairman Cummings went out to hold a hearing on in the San Francisco Bay following the allision with the Bay Bridge and with the release of 53,000 gallons of heavy fuel. Ballast water treatment. We have the first enforcement program since invasive species were identified as a major problem in the Great Lakes in the 1970s. We require ships to install ballast water treatment systems in 2009 to control invasive species into U.S. ports, waterways, of course in the inland waterways and the Great Lakes. We established a standard adopted by the International Maritime Organization from 2009 to 2012, but beginning in 2012, the standard will be increased to 100 times greater than the IMO, based on best-available technology. There are eight provisions dealing with port security that I will withhold comment on which Chairman Bennie Thompson will speak, and I'm very grateful for his participation in all of our committee work. I will also set aside for the moment the Coast Guard Deepwater assets procurement issue for Chairman Cummings to address. That was a matter on which he devoted an enormous amount of time. We remove appearance of conflict by transferring administrative law judges from the Coast Guard to the National Transportation Safety Board, as we did years ago, bipartisan initiative in our committee for pilots. The venue for appeals to the commandant decision to suspend or revoke a mariner's license, such as a captain's license, for violation of marine safety laws or acts of professional incompetence will now be heard by an NTSB administrative law judge but retaining the Coast Guard authority to decide whether to seek suspension or revocation of a mariner's license. In 2007, two former Coast Guard ALJs testified before the Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation that they were pressured not to allow a mariner's discovery of information that could vindicate that mariner. I think one of our major contributions, perhaps in my mind the most significant, apart from the Deepwater, which has already passed the House, is the establishment of new Marine Safety Authority and raising the quality of personnel and the authority for marine safety within the Coast Guard, establish marine safety as a function of the Coast Guard. It is now mentioned in their basic law. But we established marine safety as a Coast Guard function focused on actions necessary to protect life, property and the environment at sea. Created an assistant commandant for marine safety. The chief of marine safety in each Coast Guard sector; established minimum qualifications for all marine safety personnel saying that those persons appointed to marine safety positions, safety inspectors, casualty inspectors, chief of marine safety, be technically qualified for those positions that they should have at least the qualifications that the American Bureau of Shipping has and better than those. We establish a limited duty officer program in marine safety to allow commanders or chief warrant officers who have extensive marine safety experience to have the opportunity to specialize in marine safety. We require that appeals and waivers of marine safety laws and regulations be handled by qualified marine inspectors. Those marine safety regulations now are handled by the chain of command of the Coast Guard. That means an appeal can be decided by a ship driver, a helicopter pilot, who has no qualifications in the specific issue at hand. We need to raise the qualifications, the skills of those personnel in key positions of the Coast Guard. This bill does that. And we also require establishment of and funding for a course in marine safety as part of the curriculum at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. I was there in New London at the Coast Guard Academy on Friday, and a commandant of the academy and a commandant of cadets both were thrilled with this idea, as were cadets with whom I visited. And the final point I want to call attention to is the strengthening of the marine pollution prevention provisions in the act. I will leave those details to later. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes, first to express my great appreciation for John Cullather, Chief of Staff on the Coast Guard Subcommittee on the Democratic side, Richard Hiscock, Lucinda Lessley, Ianta Summers, Christy Rutherford, and on the Republican staff, John Rayfield and Eric Nagel, with whom we have worked diligently and consistently and thoroughly and achieved a great accommodation of use. Secondly, I don't share the ranking Republican member's pessimistic outlook for this legislation. The Coast Guard reauthorization has been reported from committee in the other body. It has been hotlined by the Democratic leadership in the other body. They anticipate it will clear those hotline processes shortly and that the other body will be able to, in due course, in relatively short period of time, consider a Coast Guard bill on the floor, and that we can, in fact, anticipate conference with the other body by and before the beginning of summer. I have a very positive and hopeful outlook. Third, as for redesigning and restructuring the Coast Guard, the committee has done that since the 1960s, directing how the structure of the Coast Guard shall be organized. In fact, we do far less structuring in this bill following in that tradition than is done for the U.S. Navy. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland, Chair of the subcommittee, Mr. Cummings.

Mr. OBERSTAR

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBERSTAR. I would like to inquire how much time remains on each side.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, could the gentleman yield 15 seconds?

Mr. OBERSTAR. Both gentlemen made a splendid statement on the issue and during the amendment process. Because of the persuasive case you've made, we are prepared to accept your amendment.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Most certainly. This is a 120-year-old practice in seafaring, and we ought to address that issue, as the gentleman has rightly raised it.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Of course. Please proceed.

Mr. OBERSTAR. I thank the gentleman for raising this very complex issue on which we've devoted an enormous amount of time and visited with the Norwegian Ambassador and other interests, the American Bureau of Shipping and others, and I'm committed to working with the gentleman to resolve this issue in an equitable and fair manner as we proceed forward with it.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Tauscher).

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield for the purpose of making a unanimous consent request to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird). (Mr. BAIRD asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Richardson).

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. I first thank the gentleman from Ohio for his very generous and very kind and thoughtful remarks. I greatly appreciate the camaraderie we share and the partnership in doing the work of the committee. And I want to thank the gentleman from Michigan, who gave most insightful comment on this whole bill. It is a bad day for zebra mussels and spiny echinoderms and a whole host of other invasive species that we're going to deal with severely as this bill moves to enactment. I do want to observe that the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) is concerned about five Bay Area lighthouses, Point Montara, Alcatraz Island, Lime Point in Fort Baker, Point Diablo, and Point Bonita, and we will work with the gentlewoman and the Coast Guard to expedite transfer of those Coast Guard facilities to the U.S. Park Service. And, again, I want to say, as I did at the outset, we took our time all through last year and part of this year to craft a splendid bill in an inclusive manner, hearing out the concerns of the Coast Guard and addressing extensively the concerns of the Republican members of the committee to be thorough and produce the best bill possible, and we are happy to bring this bill in good time to the House floor today.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the manager's amendment.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. The manager's amendment authorizes the Coast Guard to delegate to classification societies the Coast Guard's authority for safety plan review and construction inspections of offshore oil structures. It allows this authority to be delegated to foreign classification societies to the extent that the government of the country in which the classification society is headquartered accepts documents prepared by our classification society, the American Bureau of Shipping, on behalf of the leaseholder, and does not limit the ABS to this process. I also want to thank several colleagues for agreeing to have their amendments incorporated into the manager's amendment to expedite consideration of the bill: The gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Tauscher); the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Loretta Sanchez); the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind); the gentlewoman from Guam (Ms. Bordallo); and the gentleman from New York (Mr. Weiner). The Tauscher amendment requires federally licensed pilots to use portable electronic devices with navigational charts capable of being connected to an Automatic Identification System. The Sanchez amendment requires the Superintendent of the Coast Guard to prescribe a policy on sexual harassment and sexual violence. The Kind amendment deals with monthly ballast water treatment reports to the Secretary, requiring them. In addition, the amendment provides that no-ballast-on-board vessels will be required to conduct ballast water treatment, when applicable. The Bordallo amendment requires Coast Guard vessels homeported in Guam to be repaired at shipyards in the U.S., including Guam shipyards. The same requirement applies to all other Coast Guard cutters homeported elsewhere in the United States. The Weiner amendment requires the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a study on health, safety and environmental concerns related to an underground petroleum spill on the Brooklyn, New York, shoreline. All those amendments are incorporated into the manager's amendment. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBERSTAR. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Most certainly. I urged the gentleman at Rules in discussions to introduce a bill dealing with this authority under the Clean Water Act so that we would have a very strong authoritative base for the legislation, and that we will move quickly in committee to move it through subcommittee, full committee and to the House floor as promptly as the House legislative schedule will permit.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Loretta Sanchez).

Mr. OBERSTAR. May I inquire whether the gentleman has further speakers.

Mr. OBERSTAR. I yield the balance of our time to the gentleman from Maryland, the Chair of the subcommittee.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I rise to claim time in opposition to the amendment, though I don't intend to oppose it.

Mr. OBERSTAR. I indeed support the amendment offered by the gentleman from Ohio, who is our ranking member on the Coast Guard subcommittee, which he offers in conjunction with the distinguished gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Boustany), also a very good friend and colleague and committee member. The amendment addresses section 720 of the substitute regarding waterside security around LNG tankers and terminals. It provides that the Coast Guard may consider security assets and personnel provided by State and local officials who are contracted for or otherwise made available to an LNG terminal operator in determining whether security resources are available to carry out our waterside security measures. The Coast Guard has, as we have so often discussed, limited resources to undertake its many missions. Partnering with State and local officials or contracted waterside security services will be in effect force multipliers for the Coast Guard. So we support that initiative. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBERSTAR. How much time remains?