James Oberstar

Mr. OBERSTAR

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the motion, and I commend the gentleman from California, Mr. Filner, for offering this motion to prevent an egregious assault on the Clean Water Act, Section 12403 of H.R. 6, the Energy Policy Act of 2003, amends the Clean Water Act to provide a permanent exemption from stormwater permitting requirements for construction activities associated with oil and gas exploration and production operations. If this provision remains in the energy conference report, oil and gas exploration would be the only construction activity not subject to Clean Water Act requirements. Oil and gas operations would be under no obligation to control stormwater runoff that would impair our Nation's lakes, rivers, and streams. It is a complete, unprecedented end-run around one of our Nation's most successful environmental laws and should be stricken from the conference report. Since its enactment 31 years ago, the Clean Water Act has prevented billions of pounds of pollution from fouling our Nation's waters, and we have doubled the number of healthy rivers, lakes, and streams across America. Instead of celebrating these considerable accomplishments, this Congress, following the direction of the Bush Administration, seeks to abandon them. This provision allowing the oil and gas industry a permanent exemption from complying with Clean Water Act requirements is the latest step down that road. If left unchecked, stormwater carries pollutants from construction sites to nearby waterways, endangering human health, harming wildlife, and rendering these waterways unsuitable for recreational uses such as swimming or fishing. We cannot allow the oil and gas industry to operate without regard to the amount of pollution running into our Nation's waterways from its construction activities, thereby reversing decades of effort at reducing polluted stormwater. Since 1990, construction sites, including oil and gas construction sites, larger than five acres have been required to control stormwater pollution. In December 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a rule, to be effective in March of this year, that requires smaller construction sites, those between one and five acres in size, to control stormwater runoff. However, in response to heavy oil and gas industry pressure, EPA granted the industry a special two-year exemption from this rule. EPA decided that it needed two more years to study the impacts of enforcing this rule on the oil and gas industry, while ignoring the impacts of industry pollution on water quality. This two-year delay is nothing more than a special favor to the oil and gas industry--remember it has been nearly four years since EPA first published the rule. The provision currently at issue takes the favoritism to the extreme by providing the oil and gas industry a permanent exemption from controlling stormwater runoff--regardless of the size of the construction site. The oil and gas industry exemption is not only wrong on substance, but it is also wrong on process. Since consideration of this bill began early last spring, the Republican majority has blocked repeated attempts by Democrats to be heard on this provision. During the Energy and Commerce Committee's consideration of the House Energy Bill Committee Print in April, Congressman Markey offered an amendment to strike the offending provision. Chairman Tauzin ruled the Markey amendment out of order, stating that it was non-germane because the issue was not within the jurisdiction of the Energy and Commerce Committee and was ``within the jurisdiction completely'' of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Despite my serious concern with this Clean Water Act exemption, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee never considered the bill. When the House considered the bill, Congressmen Costello, Markey, and I sought to offer an amendment to H.R. 6 to strike the provision. But the Rules Committee blocked our efforts to offer that amendment on the House Floor. As a result, today, seven months since the Energy and Commerce Committee considered the bill, is the first time Democrats have the opportunity to debate and vote on this Clean Water Act exemption for the oil and gas industry. This provision exempting oil and gas companies from complying with the stormwater permitting requirements rolls back the clock on environmental protections and seriously jeopardizes the health of our Nations lakes, rivers, and streams. I urge members to adopt this motion and instruct the Energy bill conferees to reject this provision.

Mr. OBERSTAR

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for raising this issue. It is a matter of concern to just that very class of vessel operator that the gentleman has described. The technology known as AIS, automatic identification system, is very sophisticated. It probably has too many bells and whistles for small operators, ones they do not need. The Coast Guard has come back to reconsider this issue and is working with the International Maritime Organization to adopt what is an international standard that will be far less technologically sophisticated, if you will, than the system they have required, which will give the operator e-mail and other technology downloaded from the signal. They do not need all of that stuff. What they really need for the small vessels is name, GPS position and bearing, where they are headed; and that is what the Coast Guard will do. That will draw the cost from nearly $10,000 down to $2,000 or less for the small vessels operators, and give them and the Coast Guard the information that they really need without the bells and whistles. So I think that this ruling will be completed by next spring, hopefully in time for the boating season in the gentleman's district and in mine.

Mr. OBERSTAR. The gentleman's language limits to 1999. So it cannot go back as far as the gentleman is suggesting. I regret that this matter could not have been resolved at the committee level. It is an issue raised out of deep conviction by the gentleman from Oregon. I support his concern.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the good words of the chairman of the subcommittee. I note that our full committee chairman has arrived, and I will curtail my remarks so that the chairman, the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young) can speak. But I just want to say to what a difference a week makes and how refreshing it is to be on the floor under an open rule where issues that are of concern to Members can be resolved in open fashion and that we can conduct the work of this committee in its traditional fashion, working in a bipartisan manner. I respect enormously the work of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. LoBiondo), the chairman of the subcommittee, and our ranking member, the gentleman from California (Mr. Filner), and particularly our riverboat captain chairman, the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young), who has not only firsthand experience on the water commanding a vessel, but has enormous respect, as I have, for the United States Coast Guard. The chairman and I served on the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee from our very outset of service in the Congress, and through that work, we both came to have a great respect and admiration for the work of the Coast Guard, which started out, along with the Corps of Engineers, as one of the two oldest agencies of the Federal Government in its infancy in 1789. It was known as the Revenue Cutter Service and provided the first revenue and source of funding for our infant republic. In the years since then, I have, in my observation and my work on the Coast Guard subcommittee, I have observed that there is probably no entity of the Federal Government from which the citizens of this country get a greater return on their investment than from the United States Coast Guard. As a former Commandant once observed, it takes a special person to wear this color blue. And they are all special people, men and women, of the United States Coast Guard. What I regret about the Coast Guard is that in my 29 years of service, I have seen some 27 new responsibilities added by the Congress to the list of duties that the Coast Guard must perform. But that list of new duties and responsibilities has not been accompanied by a commensurate increase in personnel and in funding. And that has happened under Democratic and Republican administrations and Democratic and Republican Congresses. Now, we bring to the floor a $7.1 billion bill to deal with the needs of the Coast Guard, and unfortunately, in past Congresses, this bill has not become law because of issues that the other body has wanted to hang on to it and slow down its progress. This time, the authorization has been done through the appropriation process. And I earnestly hope that we are not engaged in yet another exercise in futility getting a Coast Guard authorization passed and that indeed the other body will act expeditiously and not try to tie in unrelated issues to this very important authorization. I further believe very strongly that although we have provided, I think, a responsible funding for the Coast Guard, it is still inadequate to the responsibilities that the Congress has saddled the Coast Guard with and visited upon it because we felt they could carry out all those responsibilities of drug interdiction and immigration interdiction, and now the homeland security responsibilities. They simply need more personnel and more funding to continue to carry out the job and not stretch the human resources of the Coast Guard as thin as has been done in the last few years. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from California (Mr. Filner).

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield 6 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak). (Mr. STUPAK asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Corrine Brown), former ranking member on the Subcommittee on the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, how much time remains on each side?

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, the issue of pilotage rates on the Great Lakes is one of the most vexing matters that I have had to deal with going back to my service with my predecessor as the administrative assistant when we had so many problems with the Great Lakes Pilotage Administration. We once had an administrator of that agency who would go off to his farm in Northern Virginia over the weekends when he was needed most. We could not find him. They needed regulations changed or approvals to undertake certain activities; we could not find this guy. It has just been a big headache over the years. We have shifted back and forth between the Coast Guard and the pilotage administration and who is going to administer it. I think it has now been on track. Again, pilotage has sort of been a football kicked back and forth between Coast Guard and DOT by the Office of Management and Budget; and in the process, pilots have been stiffed, to be very honest with the gentleman. Coast Guard first developed a rule for pilotage rates, sent it to the Office of Management and Budget. They reviewed it. They sent it back to the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard then sent it to the Department of Transportation because that is where they used to live. Now they live over in the Homeland Security Department. So Secretary Mineta's staff got right on it, and they worked it over and they said, well, we have these questions. And they asked the Coast Guard to answer certain questions. The Coast Guard questions were then sent to OMB. The OMB sent the questions back and now DOT has asked the Coast Guard to respond. Secretary Mineta has assured me that his office, his staff will clear the way, hopefully get it done by the end of this week so that the interim rate can be approved, at least on an interim basis, pending a final rule. It should not have to take this long, I assure the gentleman. I appreciate his advocacy on this issue. Hopefully, this will all get done within a week and pilots can apply their trade.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), the former ranking member of the subcommittee.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Chairman, how much time, may I inquire, do we have left?

Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor) guardian of the Jones Act.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Chairman, does the gentleman have further speakers?

Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel).

Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Chairman, how much time do we have remaining?

Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes. Yesterday, the Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation conducted a hearing on the Staten Island ferry accident in which 10 passengers were killed. Even at this date, the captain and the pilot of the ferry claim to be too ill to testify before the National Transportation Safety Board. The Coast Guard can take no action against them because they are incompetent or a danger to the safety of a vessel because of their statements and because of a loophole in existing law. The bill that the committee has reported includes a provision recommended wisely and appropriately by the administration to close that loophole. It does not give the Coast Guard authority to go on fishing expeditions to look at the health records of a mariner, but it does what I have long advocated, provide the Coast Guard authority that the FAA has, to require all mariners that are on medication or have illnesses that could affect their ability to operate a vessel safely, to report those circumstances to the Coast Guard so they can determine whether the individual can operate safely. Enactment of this legislation is going to close a very troublesome loophole in existing law and result in far better safety on the waters as we have an obligation to provide and should undertake, and I thank the chairman for recognizing that circumstance. I know the chairman has been under enormous pressure, to put it mildly, advocacy, to do something differently, but at the hearing yesterday it became apparent why we need to proceed with the language in the bill, which I strongly support. Let me conclude by saying, we have an outstanding bill. We have an excellent piece of work. I wish we were doing more in personnel and more in funding for the Coast Guard, but I think we have done all we can under the circumstances; and we will continue to work to improve those two areas, personnel and funding, for the Coast Guard in the future.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment. The amendment addresses a number of issues. It is always a puzzle to people, if we bring a bill to the floor, why do we have a manager's amendment? Well, because from the time the bill leaves the committee and gets to the floor, there are issues that either were fermenting and developing or that arose from the time the committee reports a bill, and that is the case here. We first have the Reserve Officer Training Program for Coast Guard officers that is established in the context of this manager's amendment, requiring all of the classification societies, including foreign classification societies, that want to do business in the United States, directly or indirectly through agents, to be licensed by the Coast Guard. We clarify that foreign flag vessels have to have security plans submitted to the Coast Guard in writing and may not operate after July 1, 2004, unless those plans have been reviewed and approved by the Coast Guard. A provision from the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald) to transfer responsibility for port security grants from DOT to Coast Guard in the Department of Homeland Security, that is a procedural matter; and the matter raised by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel), which he adequately discussed just a moment ago on the Indian Point nuclear energy facility. Finally, we will not have to deal with the issue of the authority in the basic bill for the Coast Guard to suspend or revoke a license if the mariner has been found to have operated a vessel in a negligent manner, or to have interfered with the safe operation of a vessel, endangering life or property. That has been discussed. I think this manager's amendment does all of the right things and does what a manager's amendment is supposed to do. I appreciate the work of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. LoBiondo). And as he and the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young) have noted, we have had full participation and discussion between the majority and the minority on this matter in the historic tradition of our committee.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Madam Chairman, the subject at hand here is a matter that the gentleman from Connecticut and I did indeed discuss in the course of the markup on the Coast Guard authorization bill. I raised two questions. One was with respect to the funding the gentleman has discussed and language that he has read accurately from the committee bill. The second was the eminent domain issue. I recall how very poignantly the gentleman, in fact, we met in the Democratic sitting room off the committee floor, off the committee dias, told me how very poignantly his family had been displaced by an eminent domain proceeding and that he did not want to see anybody displaced by eminent domain. I read to him the language that the gentleman from Oregon has just a moment ago referred to from the Hartford newspaper. I was very distressed by this. People had written to me about it, especially that 87-year-old Italian immigrant woman. Half Italian myself, I deeply sympathized with it. But in further reviewing the matter since the issue was before the State supreme court, I said, I will desist from the eminent domain issue. Let us watch and see whether the court can resolve this matter. If not, we can revisit it again. So we bifurcated the issue and dealt with the Federal funding issue. Now, comes the gentleman from Oregon who has been approached by the locals who very much are upset about this matter, and I understand his concern. Representing a western State, the gentleman from Oregon as the chairman of the full committee, frequently is crosscut by eminent domain issues and has confronted this matter time and again in the Committee on Resources. That is why, out of very deep personal conviction, he brings this issue to the floor. I say that for the Record. I want the Record to be clear. If the gentleman has any concern or question, I will be glad to give him a moment.

Mr. OBERSTAR. I yield to the gentleman from Oregon.

Mr. OBERSTAR. I yield to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Simmons) to respond.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Madam Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. I appreciate the amendment offered by the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Manzullo). It fits in with the longstanding position of our Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure on Buy America on steel in our Federal aid highway and transit and Corps of Engineers programs. It is only recently the committee has had jurisdiction over the Coast Guard, and there too we need this vigilance over the Truman-Hobbs Act. I authored in 1982 in the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of that year a provision that requires American steel to be used in all Federal-aid highway projects. The amendment accepted in committee and approved in the House required 100 percent American steel on all Federal-aid highway programs; and when we got to conference with the Senate, we had a little dispute. They wanted to be more supportive of international trade, and we worked out language that I had a fallback position on, and it has worked out well. It requires all steel in the Federal-aid highway program to be American steel. What we see is every bridge, every girder, every rebar, every guardrail, every fence post is American steel. When I chaired the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight in the mid-1980s, my good friend Bill Clinger, who was ranking Republican on the subcommittee at the time, and I conducted extensive inquiry into the application of the Buy American Act, and we found that the Federal Highway Administration was administering that program rigorously. Two million tons of steel a year that go into the Federal- aid highway program is American steel. It was not quite so good in the Federal Transit Administration. The Corps of Engineers was not doing a very good job at all. When they put in the caissons for the footings for bridges that the Corps of Engineers built, they used foreign steel. They built the bridge with American steel. I said wait a minute, how can they do this? Well, this is a temporary structure. But I found that the corps leaves that steel covering for the caisson in place afterward to help against scouring at the time of flood. I said, so that is a permanent structure. So we changed the law to toughen it up so the corps could not circumvent the Buy America provision. Now we come to the Coast Guard and the Truman-Hobbs bridge alteration program. The language that the gentleman offers restates a provision that is already in the Homeland Security Appropriations Act that requires American steel to be used in these projects, but we ought to put it in here. We ought to reinforce an already-established strongly held principle. These are American dollars, taxpayer dollars. In the Federal Highway Program, that is our highway trust fund dollars that are to be used to buy American steel and put it in those facilities. What stimulated events in 1982 was we were building a bridge between Duluth and Superior. The State of Wisconsin had a responsibility for that bridge construction. They let a contract to Japanese steel, 10,000 tons of Japanese steel to build a center-arch span in that bridge. I vowed that never again would we have this happen. That iron ore from the Minnesota Iron Range would have to go under a bridge built with Japanese steel? They have got to be kidding. Out of that came the Buy American provisions. By heavens, I am not going to let that slip away. We lost 890,000 jobs in the steel industry in the last 20 years to foreign steel, subsidized overseas, dumped in America, driving American jobs out. The gentleman offers a very fine amendment. We ought to toughen it, but we ought to take an overview in our committee, I say to the chairman of the subcommittee. We ought to have an in-depth review of the Buy America provision as it applies not just to the Coast Guard, and I say this to the chairman of the full committee, but as it applies to all the issues under the jurisdiction of our committee. We provide funding which averages about $80 billion a year for infrastructure programs, and we ought to make sure that everything we are buying is American steel, and American goods in other arenas as well. Cement that goes into the concrete, asphalt, they all ought to be American product. So I support the gentleman's amendment.

Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, the exchange that we have just had between the Michigan delegation, or its voice, and the Wisconsin delegation and the previous amendment offered by the gentleman from Illinois, point up a problem that we have to face and to which I alluded in my previous remarks, and that is the Buy America provisions that affect activities under the jurisdiction of our Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure need to be revisited and thought through and refined. We have two very differing views of the application of the Buy American Act to the procurement at hand that the Coast Guard is involved with. The Coast Guard is opposed to the amendment. They say the Deepwater Program will comply with the Buy American Act. The Coast Guard and the prime contractor on this procurement, Lockheed Martin, have not, to the best of my knowledge, yet selected the engine to be used, although it is widely known and supposed that it will be the Detroit Diesel engine, with major parts made in Germany, assembled in the United States. That is where the refinements come in; products, parts of which are made overseas, assembled in the United States. We have lost the whole subway, locomotive and passenger car business to overseas producers. We have lost virtually all light rail and heavy rail production to overseas. Only just recently, Colorado Railcar has come in to produce a very high quality commuter rail vehicle. We need to recapture all of that back to the United States. In the Transit Program, we have spent $36 billion over the last 6 years on buses and heavy rail, commuter rail, light rail, intercity passenger rail, and a good deal of that is being produced overseas with subassemblies brought back to the United States, largely because our industry abandoned that field because we were not buying much of it, because we were building a lot of highways. Now, a lot more money is going into the transit system. We are handling 1 million new transit riders a day in America. There is a new market, so we are starting to recreate that market. Yet, big pieces of it being be produced overseas. Well, we need to recapture that business. We need to stimulate American manufacturers. The Manzullo amendment deals with steel in bridges under the Truman-Hobbs Act. The provision offered by the gentlewoman from Wisconsin deals with equipment, vessels. There will be others when we get into the Transit program that will deal with railcars and locomotives and so on. We need a comprehensive approach to this issue. We need to further refine how the Buy American Act applies. While I sympathize fully and totally with the advocacy by the gentlewoman and the gentleman from Wisconsin, I think we are in an inadequate position right now, and I do not think that this language adequately addresses the problem at hand. So, I urge the chairman of the subcommittee, and I will yield to the gentleman, to schedule hearings on this subject. Let us take a closer in-depth look as we prepare for the next authorization for the Coast Guard in the next session of this Congress.

Mr. OBERSTAR. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.