Olympia Snowe

I share the Senator's view that it is critical to explore, support and promote alternative approaches for meeting the transportation needs of small and rural communities. This includes ensuring that Federal agencies take the appropriate…

I thank the Senator for her generous comments, and I appreciate her work on the Committee. She added an excellent amendment to the bill to ensure that the National Women's Business Council maintains a bipartisan balance. I thank her for…

In fact, in our copays, on those that are covered, the top 50, we are lower or, the converse, in Senator Graham's legislation their copays will be higher in 39 out of the 50 categories in terms of copayments. Then in the nonpreferred…

I am concerned that the study may not be completed in sufficient time to help the group life insurers avail themselves of the help that the property and casualty companies are getting in this bill. I would therefore ask the Senator from…

That's exactly right.

Do you think that your recommendations, if fully implemented, would be able to ease the crisis in fisheries management that we have today, especially with this litigation-based management?

Litigation should be the last resort, not the first resort.

I certainly wouldn't suggest that it's working in the New England groundfish industry.

I thought it was the most notable in your funding request, that, of all the funding requests, it represented the greatest increase of $100 million.

Are there any updates to these recommendations? Is that what this other additional report will provide?

You have said that we should be taking immediate steps to improve the situation by providing a comprehensive assessment.

I think we can turn it around. I thank the Committee for holding a hearing like this.

Senator Snowe, I met with fishermen last night in Maine. They are numb. They are in shock. There is despair.

There should be a sense of urgency about this, because we need to turn this agency around.

We obviously have to reverse this destructive trend toward litigation which is proliferating.

We certainly want to be involved in every way possible to ensure that we proceed in a timely fashion.

I think it's a real surprise that the judgment exceeded this settlement in a very restrictive way.

Shouldn't you be making the final decision? There is a concern here on our part about who's going to make the final decision.

I hope that sentiment prevails and is expressed in very strong terms to the Department of Justice.

I hope we can create a national program with a national approach that will reassure the industries that are directly affected by these kinds of decisions.

We must break this cycle. The courts should not be managing our fisheries--that is the job of NMFS and the Regional Fishery Management Councils.

I hope this hearing represents a turning point in NMFS' direction and helps us plot the course that we need to take.

Our fisheries management system is in a state of utter disrepair and we are caught in an endless cycle of litigation-based management.

I think that we have to determine what will best work in terms of restructuring the systems within the agency

Fisheries management needs an overhaul of major proportions here.