Political Quotes

“Let me acknowledge the point of order is due to be granted. I am, however, here to ask for the cooperation of the appropriating committee as we move forward on addressing a problem that we found as a result of the many tornadoes that devastated our country last year. And I will use an example from the city of Tuscaloosa. In the aftermath of the tornado that struck Tuscaloosa on April 27, HUD came in and calculated the loss of residences and rental units. Part of their charge was to replace the critical needs. However--and I will just use one census tract as an example--they came into a census tract that includes University Boulevard, which is a census tract made up almost entirely of rental units. However, according to HUD's calculation, they came in and they simply surveyed the owner-occupied units. Now, there were 23 owner-occupied units that were destroyed in the census tract, but there were 440 rental units that were destroyed in this same tract. So almost all the loss of property was rental units. It left the city of Tuscaloosa, a university town, woefully inadequate in its number of rental units. In their calculation, they only take the owner-occupied units, and they extrapolate from that what they consider the number of rental units to be in that same census tract. Well, you can't really base a calculation of how many rental units there are based on how many owner- occupied dwellings there are.…”