Chellie Pingree

Ms. PINGREE of Maine

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Driehaus), a member of the Committee on Armed Services.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to a member of the Committee on Armed Services, the gentlewoman from Arizona (Ms. Giffords).

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. I yield 3 minutes to the Chair of the Committee on Financial Services, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank).

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. I yield 3 minutes to a member of the Committee on Armed Services, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Loebsack).

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 572 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and insert extraneous materials into the Record.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. They really wouldn't allowed her to have insurance coverage, and that was their stated reason?

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Preexisting conditions, it is kind of shocking when you hear those stories. I heard about a State the other day that didn't have a requirement that insurance cover you in spite of a preexisting condition. And someone told me about an insurance company that considered women of childbearing age a preexisting condition. So that didn't mean you had a child, it meant you could potentially get pregnant. You may have already decided never to have a child, and why shouldn't your insurance company cover you, but they weren't going to take any chances. Why don't they just say we only want healthy people who promise never to get sick. And if you get sick, we will deny you coverage. I come from the State of Maine, where the State legislature has already required that insurance companies cover you in spite of preexisting conditions, and that is really a great reform. Maine is one of the leaders in health care reform. We have a very high number of people who have some form of insurance coverage. Many of them are on Medicaid or our MaineCare system. But the fact is, what my colleagues in Maine tell me, and I certainly felt when I was in the State legislature, is States can't go it alone. Many States in the country have passed these kinds of regulations, but then it makes it hard to compete with the State next door that doesn't bother doing any of that, or charges all the sick people more than the people who are well, and doesn't have a community rating kind of plan. One of the issues that we are facing now, particularly in States that are having a hard time holding their own budgets together, is they are saying to us: Let's makes this universal. Let's make it the same kind of coverage from State to State. And you mentioned portability. There are a lot of people now, and I forgot what somebody called the term, it is something like job lock, people who stay in their job because they are terrified to leave that job because they can't go without health insurance, or their spouse is sick or one of their children is sick. I meet people who say, you know, I've got a great idea for starting my own business. I'm ready to go out on my own, and I could create a job vacancy for somebody else here who would really like to come and work at this company because I'm ready to go do something else. But they can't take that risk. People who have just enough set aside to retire who say, I am ready to retire, but I don't dare be out there without health care coverage, so they don't retire at 57 or 58. And in this economy, where we can use any job we can find, having health care coverage would do more to boost the economy, I think, than many other things. I often say about the State of Maine, where, as I mentioned, a lot of people are self-employed, we have a lot of fishermen, or they run a small business or some kind of little entity that they are making enough money, people say to me all the time, We make enough to get by. We do okay. We own our own home. We make our own home repairs. We're doing all right, but it's health care coverage that we're worried about, our health care coverage that we can't afford and then we go without. And exactly what you mentioned earlier, those are the very people who, when they do get sick, have to go to the emergency room, who often depend--and they hate it, they depend on charity care at the hospital, uncompensated care. And I have the same situation, a lot of rural hospitals who depend on fund-raising drives just to keep the doors open, who are desperately coming down to see us all the time to say, We can't keep the hospital open. What are we going to do? And that is a vital part of our infrastructure.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. You know, absolutely. I think it's one of the reasons why earlier this year we went along with the President's proposal and invested so much in health information technology. It has been clear to people for a long time that so many different insurance companies and so many different kinds of forums just make it difficult for practitioners to run a business and hospitals to operate, and as you said, for people to get the kind of medical care that they really need. Well, we are at about time to wrap up here. I will just kind of go over again from my perspective, and certainly will let the gentleman from Ohio close with a few thoughts as well, but I just want to emphasize again that from my perspective, in my home State--and really what I hear across the country and everywhere I go--people say, Can you get a health care plan passed? Are you going to do something about all of the things that we've been talking about tonight? People want the coverage, they want a choice. As we've said many times, if you like your plan, you can keep it; if not, there will be real alternatives. They want affordability. People are willing to buy health care, but they want to know that they can afford it. This plan that has just been released has a shared responsibility from employers and individuals alike. It has real components to control costs. It makes a serious investment in prevention and wellness and invests in the health care workforce, something we haven't talked much about tonight. But I know I come from a State where there is a tremendous shortage of health care practitioners--doctor, nurses, those people that are needed to do this job to make sure that we can have good care, and that is part of the legislation is to really look at investing in our workforce. I feel very hopeful, I feel hopeful that we have already moved us forward as far as we can, that there is a sense around here really from both sides of the aisle that we don't have to debate anymore whether or not there is a problem with the system. We may have differences about how we go about fixing it, but there is a real commitment to go ahead and fix it. And I am very impressed with the President, who has just made it clear that this is something he wants to do on his watch. He wants to do it in the first year, and I think this is a tremendous commitment to really pass a health care package that works for America and get on with it. And I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. I thank my colleagues from Ohio and Illinois for being willing to be here.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. I just want to reinforce one of the points you made about what you hear from physicians. I don't know about you guys, but I feel like every time I sit down and meet with a group of doctors, I feel like I'm in a completely different era than when I first ran for office in 1992. When I was first elected to be a State senator and I would meet with my local group of physicians, the first thing they would say was, you just keep your hands off health care reform. We are perfectly happy with the way it is going. I would meet the occasional member of the practice who would say, I have got a few sources of dissatisfaction, but I mostly would meet with resistance. And when I recently met with a group of physicians in my district, I thought I was in a completely different country. Just as you said, it was physicians who are saying, I don't have any time with my patients. I signed up to make people well. And now I feel like I turn people away. I can't take low-income patients because I can't afford it. I have a room full of people that just fill out the paperwork for the insurance companies, and then half the time, the things that I know my patients should have are denied. And the kind of treatment that they should be getting, they are not able to get because they are turned down time after time. I know people are going to find this hard to believe, but a group of Maine physicians, the Maine Medical Association affiliate, actually took a poll of themselves recently; and almost 50 percent, about 50 percent of them said they were in favor of single-payer health care. Now we are not even debating single-payer health care in the current bill. But the idea that physicians now who once said to me, keep your hands off medical insurance and the health care system, are now saying, I can't take it anymore. I cannot run a practice. I can't be the kind of doctor I wanted to be. And I hear exactly the same thing from nurses, from everyone in the medical profession who just say, This is not working. How soon can you get it repaired so I can really give the care that people want? And I'm sure that you all have had similar or other experiences you want to share.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. I will just jump in on that only because the issue of the pricing of prescription drugs is a big part of my own personal history in politics and one of my great concerns. I think I have the oldest population in the Nation in the State of Maine. So between Mike Michaud and me and the two United States Senators, we cover some of the oldest Americans, and we are about 38th in per capita income. So we have a tremendous number of people who really struggle to make that decision every month: Do they pay for their medication or put food on their table or pay their heating oil bill? Now, everyone may not agree with my particular perspectives on this, but I think one of the big mistakes when the Medicare part D bill was passed was that Congress specifically prohibited negotiating with pharmaceutical manufacturers for a better price. So here we are, the biggest purchaser of prescription drugs in the world on the Medicare plan; and when the bill was passed, and luckily none of us were there so we don't have to take responsibility for that, but there was no provision for negotiating for drugs. Now, every other country in the world negotiates for a good price for prescription drugs. So in a sense, it is like we pay the highest prices in the world so that we subsidize everybody else. And I won't go on to my giant rant, but this was one of the bills that I passed when I was a State legislator on helping to regulate the pricing of prescription drugs. I will just say that one of the ways I really got involved in that and very interested in it was because Maine is a border State, we have a lot of seniors who get on buses, bus trips for seniors and go to Canada to buy their medication. And you can buy medicine in Canada, sometimes it is exactly the same drug that you would buy just across the border for one-third or one-quarter of the price. And it is not because it is a subsidized price up there, because these aren't people with the Canadian health care plan, but because the Canadian Government negotiates for a good price. So in my opinion, and I have signed on to H.R. 684, which is by our good friend and colleague, Representative Berry, that bill would force us to look at this and to do something about the pricing of prescription drugs. And I think that is one other thing we have to address if we are really going to bring down the cost of health care, the one thing we know is that when people take their medications, they stay much healthier, whether you are a senior citizen or a person with a high cholesterol rate hereditarily and you need to keep it down. So we know the importance of medication, and we know one way to drive down the cost of health care is to make sure that medicine is affordable. That is true of seniors and all people. And it is certainly one of the issues that concerns me and one of the things that I promised my constituents back home that even though we had passed this bill in Maine, I would take it on as an issue here in the United States Congress. And I know many share the same concern.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. I am going to read a quote from one of the letters that I brought in because it reinforces your point. This person is talking about their issues with the health care system. It is a Maine constituent. It says: My wife and I struggled to get our provider to pay for special infant formula that our oldest son needed to live due to his protein intolerance. This was despite our specialist doctor showing us a letter in which the insurance company had agreed in arbitration from a previous case to pay in full for the formula in cases like our son's. This is clearly one of those examples where it is a bureaucrat or a bean counter who is denying it just to save the insurance company some money. This same person also says in another example my brother-in-law was denied cancer treatment that his doctors had recommended, and only began his treatment after the insurance company overturned the decision on appeal. The delay may prove fatal to him. Both of you have said this over and over again, people want to go to their doctor or their primary care provider and get the advice they need, follow the treatment plan that they recommend, and not be told by a bureaucrat in Washington or an insurance company that they can't do it just because they are trying to save money on your health. I agree with you, we need cost-saving measures, but not on people's essential treatment.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Well, I know that not too many of the American people are still up and watching us on C-SPAN, but those who are and those who see this later I think will be just so grateful that they're hearing one more conversation about moving this forward. What they don't want to hear from us is, Well, we talked it all over but we backed down. We just tinkered with it around the edges. We couldn't really pass anything. We couldn't find a way to get to a conclusion. That is definitely not what they want to hear from us. They want to hear, you're on the floor, you're working hard, you're going to pass a health care bill before you go home on recess. I just want to add one thing, then I hope you all continue with the stories that you're hearing from your district. Just as you said, there are so many families with those kinds of stories that say, We have never had health care coverage. I pulled a few out of our office this afternoon, and they're endless, the things that people tell you, the sad things that people come up and tell you. Here's one that says, I earn $20,000 a year. What good is a mandated policy that would cost me $400 a month with a 5K deductible? I have been stripped of my wealth over the past 30 years and in nonadjusted dollars I made more when I was 24 years old than I make now as a 53- year-old. We need taxpayer-funded health care. If it's good enough for our elected officials--which we all know very well--it should be good enough for all of us. We want health care to pass right now. Here's another person who said to me something that I mentioned before. I feel like I hear this a lot in Maine. People who are self- employed. We have a lot of fishermen and farmers, woodcutters in our area, who go out and get these plans with huge deductibles. It's all that they can afford. Here's somebody who said, I can only afford a catastrophic plan with a $15,000 deductible. It's essentially insurance to save my home if my wife or I get sick. I can't afford a colonoscopy, which would cost around $3,000 to $4,000. With a family history of colon cancer, the chances of my dying from this cancer are pretty good unless I was able to detect it early. But the health insurance industry doesn't care about my health. They only care about the profit and will help those who help them. He is just feeling angry and saying, you know, you have got to do something about this now. That's one of the things that you mentioned. We need a plan, and the proposals before us talk about wellness, early intervention, women getting mammography, getting those early checkups and treatments when you need it. Before I turn it back over, I just want to share my own story, or a little bit of it anyway. I had a brother who died of melanoma, which is almost always a tragic and difficult form of cancer. He was diagnosed 20 years ago, so he would be about 60 years old today. He was 40 at the time. But without going into all the details--and sadly, most of them haven't changed, but his employer dropped his coverage. He was unable to get the kind of coverage that he needed. He and his wife had to basically turn over all their assets so they could be eligible for Medicaid. I can guarantee you that my brother spent the 18 months of his illness worrying about how he was going to provide for his family when he was gone. That shouldn't be. It shouldn't have been that way 20 years ago. It's shocking to me to think that this is 20 years later and, really, people have the same problems, or worse. We haven't fixed the system. It's only gotten more difficult. So, hold forth.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, it's a great honor to be here tonight. The freshmen members like to take a little bit of time and come to the floor and talk about issues that we find are of great concern both to our country and back home in our district. And so tonight I am going be joined by a couple of my freshmen colleagues and we want to devote our time to talk about the issue of health care. Given the late hour, we may not see as many of our colleagues as we would at other hours of the day, but we know this is an important issue any hour of the day, and I am very happy to be here and to have this opportunity to talk a little bit about it. This is certainly an important time about the--for the issue of universal access to health care and expanding the access to health care. I don't know about other Members, but I would think it's a universal feeling out there that this is the number one issue for so many Americans. I started campaigning a long time ago. I got sworn into office last January. And I can say, during the entire time I was campaigning and since I have been elected to office, for so many people, this is their number one issue. I hear this from individuals who don't have health care coverage, people who have insurance and don't find that their company is there when they need it. I hear it from big business owners who are challenged by the cost of health care, from small business owners who don't know if they can continue to cover their employees. It is a universal issue. I hear it from providers, from doctors and nurses and others who say, You know, when I signed up to take care of people, to make sure that their health care needs were going to be met, I didn't expect a system that would fall apart in the way that it has. This is, as I say, a universal issue. People say to me, Health care ought to be a basic right. It is extremely important that this Congress does something about the issue of health care, and we want to see you do something. The good news is that this Congress is working very hard on putting together legislation. The President budgeted $634 billion for health care reform in the budget that we have already passed, and the Speaker of the House is committed to passing a bill by the end of July. The President has asked us for a bill on his desk this fall. The discussion draft was released in the House just this Friday, and I, personally, can say that I am happy to see a lot of the good things that are included in there, a public plan option, better insurance regulation, insurance companies won't be able to cut people out who have preexisting conditions, reasonable amount of cost-sharing and emphasis on prevention and wellness, investments in Medicare and Medicaid, many of the things that we have been talking about and that I hear about all the time from constituents in my district are in this bill. More than anything else, people say to me you need to pass universal access to health care. You need to do something now. And I feel like we are right here in the middle of this, and we are moving forward on this. In my own district, like many other of my freshmen colleagues, every chance I get during the break, on weekends, we have been meeting with groups of individuals. And as I said, this spans from constituents who I meet in the grocery store, who tell me about their individual challenges, to doctors, nurses, providers, nontraditional providers, to chambers of commerce. And, once again, what I hear is they all want change, and they want things to move forward. I had the good fortune of being a State legislator in the past, and this was, back when I first ran for office in 1992 as a State legislator, again, one of our number one issues. And it's amazing to me now, 17 years since then, it hasn't gone away, in spite of the many things we attempted to do in my home State, the State of Maine, to take on the pricing of prescription drugs to attempt to expand access to more individuals in our State. On each and every one of those we made progress but we haven't gone far enough. And when I hear from my colleagues, my former colleagues in the State legislature, my daughter, who is the Speaker of the House--and as you can imagine, I am very proud of her--the one thing they say to me is, You have got to do something about this. We have tried as hard as we can in our home State, but we can't go it alone. States across the country are feeling the exact same challenge, but they want now to have us at the congressional level to do something about this. Now there are many things that we could talk about tonight. We even have a few charts and graphs, but let me just get started by recognizing my good friend and colleague, Mr. Boccieri from Ohio. I know he is hearing about this quite a bit in his home district, and it would be great if you could just talk a little bit about some issues and concerns and then we can keep going on this topic.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. We're joined by another one of our colleagues, but you mentioned some of the cost issues. Since we have a couple of charts, I thought I might just put them up here right now. You talked a little bit about the expenses of health, and here's one that shows how our national health expenditures have really just, as they say, gone off the charts. This is one of those charts, actual and projected, that shows that we can no longer afford this. People always say to us, How are you going to pay for health care? I say, when I talk to businesses, individuals, I say, How are we going to afford the system the way it is? And this is one of the charts that really, really shows that. Let me just show another one right now. I think this is one that we don't have to tell any of our constituents. We, again, hear it all the time. We hear it from business owners who say they're worried that they can't cover the cost of their employees anymore or they have really cut back. But here's one that just shows, since 2000, health care premiums have doubled while wages have only gone up by just 3 percent. So it is no wonder that people everywhere we go are saying to us, We're just dropping our coverage. They're just going without coverage or they're going for the $10,000 deductibles. How many constituents have you seen that say, I've got a $10,000 deductible and a very expensive plan, and I spend the whole year paying that $10,000. Why do I even have insurance? That's just something I feel like I hear all the time. Why don't we welcome our other colleague, the other night owl here, Congresswoman Halvorson from Illinois. And we're just so pleased to have you join us and hold forth.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Thank you to the Chair of the committee for yielding me this time. Now, you can imagine when I first saw this amendment I was quite angry, and I don't want to be discouraged about the motives of the good Representative from Texas, so I thought, well, perhaps the good Representative from Texas doesn't understand the importance of this to Maine. And as he said, in many ways he doesn't. I know, because he has a farming district. I'm sure in his district, it's important to him to have dairy program subsidies, cotton subsidies, wheat subsidies-- millions of dollars of which come into his State every year. This is $200,000, Mr. Speaker, to a very important industry in our State, the lobster fishing industry. Now, if you're from Texas, fishing may seem like a distant thing, and I understand that may be complicated. But let me just say that fishing is a common resource. This $200,000 helps us to monitor these fisheries, a very tightly controlled and restricted fisheries, but very successful fisheries in our State because of it. And this is the subsidy that the Federal Government--as well as our State government-- gives to help make sure that this stays a healthy resource. Now, just to give you a sense of the size of this industry, there are 7,000 licensed fishermen in the lobster industry. They brought in 69 million pounds of lobster in the last year. Now, I know in Texas, $242 million may not sound like a substantial contribution to the economy, but that's big money in the State of Maine. And fishing is big business in our State and very important to our State. Eighty-five percent of all of the lobsters in this country come from the State of Maine. Now, it may be that you think about lobsters as some sort of glamorous food, but the fact is we're talking about hardworking fishermen. And let me tell you a little bit about how this industry works. By law in the State of Maine, these are basically individual entrepreneurs. Each one of these fishermen is a small business, and it's a family business for most people who go lobster fishing in the State of Maine. Unlike other States where you may have big corporate farms that get big corporate subsidies, these are individual fishermen. This is not a subsidy to them. This is making sure that there is a resource for them out there, and by law, they operate as individuals. They buy the gas, they pay for their boats, often their own children go to work with them on the boat every day. They get up early morning, work long, hard hours, and struggle with a resource that isn't always abundant and plentiful. That's why we need to monitor this resource. It's been a tough year for the fishermen in our State, partly because of the economic downturn. These fish are often processed in Canada and the Canadian banks had a problem because they were affiliated with Iceland last year. So these fishermen have been struggling. These hardworking fisherman just want to make sure that there is a resource available to them in the future. Mr. Chairman, it is possible that the good Representative from Texas did not understand how vital this was to the State of Maine. It is possible that he thought this would be a way to use our subsidy of the fishing industry as an example. But I just want him and everyone else here in this body to know that this is one of the most regulated fisheries in the world. These are some of the most hardworking fishermen in our country. This is an important resource to our State, and $200,000 isn't very much to ask to a lot of hardworking people who contribute to our economy in the State of Maine every day and are counting on our support. I hope that the good Representative from Texas will withdraw his amendment. But if not, I urge everyone in this body to vote against this and to vote for the economy and the State of Maine.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Madam Speaker, I want to talk to you this morning about Hodgdon Yachts of East Boothbay, Maine. Hodgdon Brothers opened for business in 1816 and is the oldest continually operated shipyard in the United States. Tim Hodgdon is a fifth-generation boat builder, continuing a long and proud tradition. Hodgdon has taken Maine's tradition of world-class craftsmanship and combined it with new technology and advances in composites to build their business and create good paying, sustainable jobs in our State. For example, in the small town of Richmond, Maine, Hodgdon has created a facility to build boat interiors. Between 60 and 70 new jobs have been created there in the last 6 months alone, and Hodgdon believes they can double the size of that operation in the next year. And just this week, Hodgdon was given a Maine Technology Institute grant for nearly $4 million to take the first steps towards building a 30,000-square-foot facility that would create hundreds of more jobs building high-speed patrol boats of the future. Hodgdon Yachts is just one example of the innovative companies doing business in Maine, aggressively using new technology to create good, quality jobs that can't be exported.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, coastal communities across this Nation are in trouble. In Maine and in other coastal States, working waterfronts and the jobs they provide are quickly disappearing. Working waterfronts include commercial fishing, boatyards and other businesses who need access to the water. Once these businesses close, once the waterfront stops supporting these businesses, history shows us they do not come back. Recently, I introduced the Keep America's Waterfronts Working Act of 2009. This bill will help communities acquire permanent access to the water and develop programs to protect working waterfronts and the jobs they provide, the backbone of our coastal communities. A report released this week, the ``State of the U.S. Ocean and Coastal Economies,'' coauthored by Professor Charlie Colgan from the University of Southern Maine, found that coastal counties contributed 42 percent of the national economic output in 2007, and working waterfronts are critical to supporting this economy. We must protect working waterfronts and the jobs they provide. I would like to thank my colleagues for joining together to protect working waterfronts, and I look forward to working together to move this legislation through Congress.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Madam Speaker, coastal communities across this nation are in trouble. Fishermen who have spent their lives on the water--the sons and daughters of fishermen, the grandchildren of fishermen, fishermen from families that have been fishing for generations, have hung up their boots and do not go out sea any more. My friends and neighbors are giving up a lifetime of fishing. Businesses that depend on the water shut their doors and close their wharves. You see Madam Speaker, I live in a community built around fishing. A community with a working waterfront. A community that is in trouble. When I was a teenager in my hometown, the island of North Haven, there were more fishermen and the island supported a diverse fishery. Throughout the history of the islands of Penobscot Bay, from the first natives fishing of off the island in dugout canoes to the herring seiners, gill netters, ground fisherman, and lobstermen, fishing has been an important part of the islands--providing jobs and a sense of place. The fishing vessel Starlight seined for herring in the waters off the island and brought fish ashore for lobster bait. Now, most boats fish for lobster. My friends and neighbors on North Haven, like all fishermen up and down the coast, need a place to land their lobsters, store their bait, load and unload their lobster traps. In some communities fishermen use privately owned piers, in other communities they compete for space at public landings and town docks. Some keep their skiffs upside down on the beach and others on the dock, most park their trucks at the landing. Coastal landowners who used to allow their friends and neighbors to cross their property to get to the clam flats face rising property taxes and pressure to sell. With these sales to the highest bidder, frequently to build a vacation home or condos on a desirable and ``authentic waterfront,'' access for the community is lost in the process. Condos spring up, displacing the fishermen and boat builders, and the wide variety of businesses that require access to the water. As new construction sprawls, traditional ties to the water are severed and the economic engine that is our coast sputters and stalls for want of a place to land a fish or dock a boat. Our nation's working waterfronts are disappearing. Less than 20 miles of Maine's 3,300 mile coastline support commercial fishing and other traditional marine based activities--and working waterfronts are continuing to disappear. These are a very important 20 miles. Maine's Working Waterfront Coalition, a broad and diverse group of stakeholders dedicated to protecting working waterfronts, conducted a study that found that working waterfronts like those supported by this legislation add between $15 and $168 million more to the economy than do the conversion of those properties to high end residential uses. Working Waterfronts support many communities up and down the coast. Every community is unique but they all are connected by the bond of having a working waterfront. The challenges facing working waterfronts are not unique to Maine. These waterfronts are disappearing up and down our coasts, in all of our coastal states. In Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, Virginia and South Carolina, Florida and Texas, California, Oregon, and Washington and even on the Great Lakes. Across the country, working waterfronts and the jobs they provide are quickly disappearing under the tremendous pressure these communities face from conversion to incompatible uses. As history has shown us, once these business close, and waterfronts stop supporting water dependent businesses, they do not come back. Together, our nation must take an important step towards protecting these jobs and the families they support--and even, eventually rebuilding our working waterfronts. In honor of the many folks in Maine who have been tirelessly working to ensure these special areas are protected, I am proud to have introduced legislation, H.R. 2548, with Representatives Madeleine Z. Bordallo, Lois Capps, Bill Delahunt, Sam Farr, Barney Frank, Patrick J. Kennedy, Ron Klein, James R. Langevin, James P. McGovern, Mike McIntyre, Michael H. Michaud, James P. Moran, Mike Thompson, and Robert J. Wittman that encourages states to consider the importance of working waterfronts and how to best protect them. Our legislation amends the Coastal Zone Management Act to establish a Working Waterfronts program. The Coastal Zone Management Act is a flexible tool, developed to allow states to manage their coasts in a manner that fits that particular coast. In recognition of this, the Working Waterfronts program broadly defines working waterfronts to be water-dependent, coastal related businesses--this includes commercial fishing, recreational fishing businesses, aquaculture, boat yards and other businesses whose business model requires access to the water. This bill creates a Working Waterfront Grant program to help states protect and preserve these important areas. In order for states to be eligible for a working waterfront grant, the State must have a working waterfront plan that requires a thoughtful, collaborative, public process to identify the economic and social value of working waterfronts and the plan requires the states to be thoughtful and strategic in their use of federal money. This bill is not designed to require states to undergo a completely new or comprehensive planning process but rather to utilize existing information to the maximum extent practicable. The program encourages states to use the best information they have available to develop their working waterfronts plan. It is not our intention to require a detailed or in-depth GIS study of the entire coast, an undertaking that may well be beneficial but also could delay and hinder the implementation of the program. We only ask that the coastal states give some thought to what makes a working waterfront in that state and why working waterfronts are particularly important or special to that state. This bill not only protects working waterfronts and the jobs they provide, this bill also protects public access to our coastline. One of the conditions of the bill states that any working waterfront receiving a working waterfront grant must provide access to the water for the public. The bill makes an exception for commercial fishing if providing access would not be safe. Those who live on or visit our coasts know how valuable coastal property is--and this is why traditional uses of working waterfronts are vulnerable. Eliminating working waterfronts fundamentally alters the economy, culture and heart of coastal communities. Please join me in supporting the Keep America's Waterfronts Working Act of 2009; help protect working waterfronts and the jobs they provide.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. I will reserve my time until the gentleman has closed. I have no other speakers.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 463 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier). All time yielded during consideration of the rule is for debate only. I yield myself such time as I may consume. General Leave

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, I first want to say to my good friend and colleague from California, I, too, agree that it is nice to be on the floor talking about a wonderful bipartisan effort and having such agreement on an issue that is very important to the people of this country. Mr. Speaker, at this moment, I'd like to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews), a member of the Armed Services Committee who did considerable work on the issue we're talking about today and made it possible for us to bring it to the floor. (Mr. ANDREWS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)