00:00 Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that. First questions for Administrator Abbott.
00:06 You said that when you look at reconstruction of the bridge, you'll look
00:11 at current standards consistent with law. Does the current law allow, in this
00:18 circumstance like this, a rebuild of a different kind of bridge in order to be
00:24 eligible for either federal or for the cost share? Because you could you could
00:30 build one under current standards and that could be in violation of what the
00:33 law under this circumstance allows you to do. So can you walk through that a little bit?
00:38 Thank you for the question, sir. Yeah, I think what we're examining and working
00:44 with Maryland DOT on, you know, the original bridge was built in the 1970s,
00:50 you know, a truss bridge, which was common at the time. You know, today most of the
00:55 bridges that are being replaced that are truss bridges are being replaced by
00:58 cable-stayed bridges. Different standards, obviously we're going to want to hear
01:03 from the NTSB on their, you know, final results of that investigation. But under
01:08 the law, what we want to do is when we're replacing a structure of that size, we
01:12 want to build it to current standards and Maryland DOT will be allowed to do
01:17 that. What we want to make sure we're not doing is allowing for any quote-unquote
01:21 betterments that did not exist that would be then covered by the ER program.
01:26 Admiral Gauthier, the Corps has expended significant resources and in the
01:33 recovery effort. There's no mechanism for the, I'm sorry, the Coast Guard has, there's
01:38 no mechanism for the Coast Guard to recoup that funding. You're not typically
01:42 reimbursed for this kind of work, yet with a workforce shortage of about 10%,
01:48 you're closing, you're downgrading stations within the Coast Guard, not
01:52 because of this incident, but that's just what's happening in the Coast Guard. And
01:56 we're not, we passed a Coast Guard authorization that gets us to 14 and a
02:01 half billion for 25 and 15 billion for 26. So we're not near the goal of 20, a
02:07 20 billion dollar service for 2030. So just as Congress moves forward with the
02:11 supplemental appropriations for the Key Bridge, how is the Coast Guard thinking
02:15 about being part of that supplemental appropriation to get reimbursed for the,
02:19 get some cost recovery for your work? Yeah, thanks, Rankin member. I don't want
02:24 to get ahead of the administration on the plans, the amounts and so on, the
02:28 details of the supplemental, but the way you've articulated, first of all, we have
02:34 been expending operating funds as we do during emergencies like this, like we do
02:38 for hurricane responses and other things, and we've been keeping close tabs on
02:45 those. And so far we've spent about 20 million dollars of direct and indirect
02:49 funding on this particular response. But what we see in events like this and
02:54 and others like it is that we call, we do what we call burn readiness, right? So we
03:01 have to have other assets around the area work harder and to cover for the
03:06 boats, aircraft, people who are working these. We've mobilized now, when I visited
03:10 the command post, on average we've had about 200 individuals at the peak in the
03:16 command post per day. That's gone down. We're mobilizing them from around the
03:21 country. In fact, most of them are from outside Baltimore right now, and so
03:24 there's an opportunity cost from the commands that provide those individuals.
03:29 And I think what this exposes, sir, and you know us well, is that the Coast Guard
03:34 readiness is becoming more and more brittle as we fail to have the kind of
03:39 consistent budgets reaching that 20 billion a year that the Coast Guard's
03:43 articulated, reaching the 3 billion per year on our procurement construction and
03:49 improvement, double what we actually receive in order to do the necessary
03:53 capitalizations. And so this brittleness in our readiness manifests in a whole
03:58 bunch of different ways, and we really do appreciate congressional support and ask
04:03 for additional support for appropriations in the future. Yeah, thanks.
04:07 General Graham, now to you. It's kind of the same question, but last week the Corps
04:11 reprogrammed 20 million dollars in unused funds from FY 2020, including a
04:16 million dollars out of my district and from prior year funds. Do you have an
04:23 estimate how many more dollars you might need to reprogram first? And second, how
04:28 are you thinking about a supplemental appropriations for cost recovery for the
04:33 Corps? Ranking Member Larson, thank you for that question. Similar to the Coast
04:37 Guard, we certainly want to get ahead of the administration, but right now we've
04:41 been able to use the project funds, and as your opening statement indicated, that
04:46 dredging work that we had planned to do with those funds in this year will still
04:51 need to be done. The emergency reprogramming that I referenced in my
04:56 opening statement, most of that money we didn't need. So where does that money
05:01 come from? Mainly it's bid savings. A lot of these projects had happened during
05:06 times of COVID when it was a very favorable bid environment, and we were
05:09 able to go back to those funds. A good example of what some of that might be, a
05:17 contractor might put a claim on a project, a request for equitable
05:21 adjustment, and a few years later those claims have been adjudicated, and if we
05:27 didn't have to pay that request, then we would unobligate those funds. Mr.
05:33 Van Otam, if I could indulge you for a moment, not for a question, but I do want
05:37 to let Chair Homendy know, I'll need to absorb your first half of your report. It's
05:45 rather technical, I'm not an engineer, but we'll absorb it and get back to you
05:48 with some questions on it. And just as a data point for the committee, the
05:53 Skagit River Bridge collapse in 2013 cost a total of 19 million dollars for the
06:00 insurer and took us 10 years to recover 19 million dollars. So we should not be
06:05 thinking of waiting to recover costs from the insurer of the
06:12 carrier or the bridge or whatever in order to pay for it. It's gonna have to
06:15 take place first because it took 10 years to get 19 million dollars. If
06:19 that's the average time it gets 19 million dollars, we'll all be dead by
06:23 the time we get the money back from this ocean carrier. So just a
06:29 data point for folks. Thanks. Mr. Crawford.
