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Senate Passes $10.5 Billion Aid Package

Posted on: Friday, 2 September 2005, 06:00 CDT

WASHINGTON -- Acting in an emergency, late-night session, the Senate approved $10.5 billion in immediate aid Thursday to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The House of Representatives was to follow suit today on a spending bill to help federal agencies -- principally the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers -- keep up relief efforts over the next few weeks.

Most members of Congress won't return until after Labor Day, when they end a five-week recess. The emergency money was being approved under unanimous consent, a procedure reserved for non-controversial matters. That means that only a handful of members of each chamber need to be present.

The money was a down payment on the billions of dollars that will be needed for housing, food, medical care, restoration and environmental cleanup in the coming months.

At the same time, the White House said that for the next 60 days, it will exempt the hard-hit states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama from their obligation to bear 25% of the relief costs.

The urgency contrasts with decades of government decisions that provided too little money to shore up New Orleans' defenses against hurricanes, some critics said.

"When you don't invest in infrastructure, you are going to pay sooner or later," said Mike Parker, former assistant secretary of the Army for civil works and a former Mississippi congressman. "And that's what we are doing right now." Parker is a Democrat-turned-Republican appointed by Bush as civilian head of the corps. He was forced to resign in 2002 after he testified before Congress that the administration's budget request was insufficient to meet the corps' mission -- including flood control.

In an interview, he noted that Congress approved a hurricane protection plan for New Orleans after Hurricane Betsy flooded the city in 1965. The plan was to be completed by 1975 but remained unfinished when Katrina struck Monday with winds over 140 mph.

"The corps has always asked for money to complete it, and you have members of Congress who know the need," Parker said. He blamed budget hawks at the Office of Management and Budget, in both parties, for keeping the work unfinished. "I blame a lot of our leaders over the last 40 years," he said.

Congress routinely spends more on the Corps of Engineers than the White House asks for. In fiscal years 2001 and 2002, slightly more than $100 million was spent annually on New Orleans-area construction and studies for flood control and hurricane protection -- about one-third more than President Clinton sought. Since then, spending for those programs has averaged $76million a year, about one-third more than Bush asked for. But it has never been enough to complete the New Orleans defenses.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, in an interview Wednesday with the Arlington Heights, Ill., Daily Herald, questioned whether low-lying areas of New Orleans should be rebuilt. "That doesn't make sense to me," he said in a transcript provided by the newspaper. Hastert said Thursday that he meant "we might have a smaller New Orleans when we get done."

Source: USA TODAY

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