Remarks to the Community in Tarboro, North Carolina

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 27, 1999

The Department of Labor has authorized $12 million for temporary jobs and to assist in cleanup and restoration activity. People who need them ought to try to get them. The money is designed not only to help you clean up but to help people who are out of work and need some immediate income to get it. And if there's more needed, we'll try to get more down here.

The Small Business Administration has authorized disaster loans for homeowners to repair or replace damaged property and loans for businesses to repair property, equipment, and inventory, and provide companies - this is important - and provide companies with adequate capital until they can resume normal operations. And that's very, very important, so you all need to take advantage of these things.

FEMA has set up an 800 number for victims of the flood. And people who are eligible for the individual relief programs should call the hotline, the FEMA hotline, which is 800462-9029. For the reporters in the audience, please put this in the paper - that's 800-462-9029.

Now, the next thing that we've got to do is to deal with the housing problem, which is a huge, huge problem. Some people are insured against the floods - and we just learned today, apparently because of blanket policies, but most people who have been flooded out, as has already been said, were not in any flood plain. Some of you in a 500-year flood plain, nobody gets insured for that. Many people beyond the 500-year flood plain - which means if you got flooded out, it shouldn't happen again for another 600 or 700 years - we know you'll be prepared. [Laughter]

Now, for you there are - and a lot of people here are low income people that don't have much money. And if people that can't repay any kind of loan can qualify for cash assistance, and everybody can qualify, we're going to try to do what we did in North Dakota, which is to get as many trailers as possible available for people to live in that can be taken to their property and plugged in, so people can supervise either getting another trailer if they were living in a trailer, or rebuilding their homes while they're onsite.

For those who don't want to do that and who need help, there are cash funds that are available to help you live somewhere else and other help available to buy furniture and do things of that kind. You need to make sure, as soon as you can, if you lost your home, as soon as these centers are clearly up and open - and I know a lot of you are dying to move out of these shelters, but it has got to be safe and the water has got to go down first - but you need to make sure that you know where the application centers are; that you go in, you figure out what you're eligible for.

Now, what we have to do is go back to Washington and complete the assessment of not only how much damage was done here, the worst place, but also in Virginia, which was hit pretty hard, and all the way up to New Jersey and New York, which were hit pretty hard. And then we've got to figure out if we have enough money to deal with the present problem. We know we need extra help for the farmers, but we've got to look and see if we've got enough extra money - Secretary Slater and I saw some roads that were washed out. It costs money to fix some roads that were washed out. It costs money to fix those roads. We've got to make sure we've got the funds necessary to do what needs to be done. If we do, well, we'll flow them; if we don't, we'll go back to Congress and try to get some more.