Eleanor Holmes Norton

the money for WMATA, the stimulus money for WMATA is not in hand?

What assurance can you give us that those funds will be obligated within those 90 and I guess 120-day timeframes?

the problem we have here is a move it or lose it problem.

Let me just speak for the District of Columbia. I mean, we have truly embraced the whole concept of restore the core...

I guess that is the nature of the beast here.

I congratulate the District as the first to put up its share initially when we were going for these funds...

Well, maybe I am overly anxious, but it does seem to me that some of that work--we are coming on into May--could have been started and I am a little concerned.

It would be such a tragedy if we had a series of audits that because we were trying to get jobs for Americans as quickly as possible that the prediction that nobody can get money out that quick without having disproportionate issues to…

WMATA may have to take the lead on this.

why couldn't that kind of work be already underway?

I have been getting money in the transportation bill because WMATA needs the First Street tunnel.

And basically all they need to do is to show you that they can do the job. They are not competing with other transit systems, are they, for this money?

It is scandalous that the Federal Government provides a pittance for transit service to the national capital region.

For the past 8 years, we have had to work with an administration that appeared to be ideologically opposed to funding extensions to transit systems.

The stimulus funds are calculated to get out fast, produce jobs immediately, and of course to get the work done the Federal Government needs to have done in the States and in the Federal Government.

Now, wait a minute. So you have to make a decision first?

the issue is obligation.

There is a lot of difference among those things.

You have no idea how many funds are obligated as of now?

How would the Red Cross handle an event with so many widely dispersed people with disabilities across the region?

This is perhaps--I mean, this is a tremendous deficit for one of the most significant regions in the country.

I have no complaint about what you have done, given the resources available to you.

So you would, if we passed a whole new gun law in the District of Columbia, so new that it said, 'You don't have any more gun laws in the District of Columbia,' would you have to retrain every officer?

I regard it as an unplanned event. Sure, there was planning, and, sure, most of the planning worked.

With the Secretary, the first Secretary of HHS under President George W. Bush, I came to the Washington Hospital Center, sat with your personnel, and had a very impressive briefing of what ER One would look like and how it would operate.