Collin Peterson: “as I indicated earlier, our entire town of East Grand Forks has been under water. This is the residential area, where it…”

“as I indicated earlier, our entire town of East Grand Forks has been under water. This is the residential area, where it shows the devastation and all the belongings out on the berm. I would also like to talk about the business situation. One of the reasons we need this through an amendment is so we can have some flexibility to deal with the problems we have in the business community. The entire business community of East Grand Forks was under water, some of it for 2 weeks. Under the current FEMA program there is really no way to deal with this situation because it is all loans, and these people, loans are not going to work for them. I can tell my colleagues of business person after business person where their inventory, their equipment has been wiped out, they have got debt. There is no way, putting more debt on top of that, that it is going to solve their situation. We need this CDBG money so we can have the flexibility to rebuild these communities. I very much encourage my colleagues to support this amendment.”