On the recordJune 26, 2012
I think what we have is a rather classical kind of situation. The gentleman from California, I suspect, has no Essential Air Service site in his district, but there are 100 communities, more than 100 communities around the country, some of them in very isolated circumstances. I don't know about the situation in the case of the one from Baltimore, but it must be somebody who is on the east shore and gets Essential Air Service out of Cambridge, Maryland, or some other place like that, that is of great significance to them and might be of some significance to the person who represents that eastern shore of Maryland. He uses several times in several ways the example of Alaska. Alaska happens to be a territory with huge distances and relatively unpopulated, and they don't have any roads in much of Alaska and so the only way they can get in and out is by air, or maybe in the wintertime by dog sled. So I think it is really presumptuous of the gentleman from California to attack all of this program of essential air services covering services in a lot of the rural parts of this country. I have none in my district. Many of the urban areas obviously do not have any in their area. But the Montanas and the much more rural States, elsewhere in the mountain States and so on, there are numerous of them that use the Essential Air Service, and I think that the idea of simply zeroing this one out, in a petulance almost, is really quite inappropriate.…
