Olympia Snowe

Thank you all for being here today.

I mean, they need more certainty than this rather than sending them through a bureaucratic treadmill here.

Thank you, Chair Landrieu, for holding this hearing on what is now the largest oil spill in the history of this nation.

So the $3,100 represents 30 days of income?

What is the average claim?

Over 26,000 claims have been submitted with payments of more than $36 million.

Why can't you all get together, just have one-stop shopping? Is that possible? Why isn't that possible?

I just cannot understand why this is not all being coordinated. It has to be one-stop shopping.

Now, is there a reason why less than 10 percent of the claims have gone to businesses outside of the fishing industry, such as restaurants?

That is a very limited period of time, wouldn't you think, the 30 days?

I just do not understand this, because going through your process in SBA, if you are a catalyst at solving it and doing one-stop shopping, I mean, that would be one thing.

I want to associate myself with the words of Chairman Dodd. There are a number of lenders in Maine that make smaller size loans. Because the points and fees cap in the Merkley-Klobuchar amendment, which I supported, is based on a…

Clearly there has got to be some responsibility on the part of BP to make that, correct that situation, to mitigate that.

We are going to make sure that BP repays all that assistance, correct?

So it seems to me that we have to get some clarity on those issues because the person should or the business owner should be made whole.

But it is certainly something that we would want to incorporate into law at some point, to make sure that that flexibility is available.

We ought to decide, certainly for our purposes too, what we need to do to change the law in that regard.

There has to be some way for BP to assume the responsibilities for that because if the business is going to SBA and does not have the necessary collateral to back up that loan, I mean this is the difficulty that they are going to, the…

See what you did, Chair Landrieu, instantaneously?

Thank you very much, Chair Landrieu, for holding this oversight hearing on SBA's Disaster Assistance Program.

In any event, we get things done.

We have to do everything we can to extend assistance to you.

Today's credit crunch constitutes the worst since 1942 according to a recent FDIC survey

I think having an extension of the SBA performing outreach across the country would be critical

We do things quickly here.