Multi-State Disaster Relief Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARIO DIAZ-BALART of Florida. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Obviously, we've heard it before. I'm disappointed that, frankly, none of the bills that we are considering today are from any Republicans, and I know that's something we need to continue to work on, but I want to refer to this specific legislation.

It would direct the administrator of FEMA to review and revise the current the regulations, as we just heard, related to eligibility under its Individuals and Households Program. Again, specifically, it would require FEMA to consider whether a county in one State is adjacent to a State that has been designated in a major disaster or emergency. In other words, there may be a county in a different State that may be affected, and that's got to be considered as well because, again, the impact of disasters are obviously not contained or limited to just manmade geographic boundaries.

In many cases, the destruction is significant enough that all States involved are designated in a major disaster emergency, but in some cases that's not the case. So there could be a State right next door that has one county that's been significantly hit but the rest of the State has not, and this would hopefully remedy that, and this would allow FEMA to look at that and remedy that.

I think this is a commonsense bill. It's also taking place now while we're already in the hurricane season, so I think it's important that we're doing this now. For those of us who are living in States that are too often--more often than we would like, because obviously once is too often--affected by storms and the like, this could not come soon enough.

So I want to thank the chairman and thank all of you for bringing this forward. It's a commonsense piece of legislation.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. MARIO DIAZ-BALART. Mr. Speaker, as I said before, this is a commonsense bill. As the ranking member of the subcommittee that deals with emergency management and other issues, it would have been nice to have this go through the committee process through regular order. It didn't. It came straight to the floor. But it is a good bill. It's a very good bill. It's a commonsense bill and obviously I do support it.

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