what has been put forward to the rest of the country is not enough to help us back just this week the brookings institute released a study that the three communities in or near my district among the bottom ten weakest performing metro region nationwide what has become of our region of of california is nothing short of an economic disaster i'm here to ask you know i'm here to plead with you to provide the relief we desperately need my constituents have lost their homes they've lost their jobs and they've lost their home they're looking to washington and all of you for help we need federal assistance and we need it now when hurricane katrina devastated the gulf shore our nation watched in horror as victims lost their jobs and their home mr chairman members of the committee i have been saying for quite some time the devastation in my district is very similar to that of katrina but was not caused by one extreme event over the course of a couple days in the central valley of california we have lost our jobs we have lost our homes however there's been no rescue operation in fact my constituents far fewer resources from the federal government than almost any region of our nation regardless of whether your property is up on the front lawn due to a storm or to a vixen marshall you are still homeless and your property is still in the front yard and you imagine your family is a victim from your home and your child looks up at you and ask daddy where are we going to stay tonight and starts to cry when she sees her favorite baby average of federal dollars per capita according to the census bureau in two thousand and eight the federal government just an average of eighty four hundred seventy five dollars per person across the country in my congressional district we were less than half of that  i understand mr handling and others that our entire nation is hurting right now i get it but the fact is we are hurting much much worse when federal disaster designations  declared it's because the state and local governments cannot cope with the devastation has been left in the way more than that's exactly the situation in our district more than thirteen percent of our mortgages remain in foreclosure with three cities in my district having the second fourth and highest foreclosure rates in the country home values of plummeted forty two percent in my community in the last year the last twelve months and nearly seventy percent since the high constituents the ones that still have work to make thirty three percent less than the average american worker small businesses a neighborhood restaurants which were once packed with customers are now empty and shuttered our longest serving community banks was swept into the are looking for additional ways to fund money not to cut other people's fun we're trying to figure out ways to be creative in that i'm working with the chairman on those questions  funding streams that go out and i'm hearing continually from constituents homeless shelters that their cause is going up their contributions are going down nonprofit domestic violence shelters the pressure of looking at trying to do everything we can to address this situation is just before we walked in congressman bacchus and i were talking about a large homeless shelter housing over three hundred women in birmingham the love jones has said and i think the words of mr johnson are incredibly when there is a national natural disaster and the whole premise behind the federal government acting is that state and local authorities don't have the resources to deal with the crisis and so we expect that money not only to eventually get there but to get there in a manner befitting the fact that this is a crisis and people need immediate help and we have to have safeguards and those safeguards have to be put in place quickly enough that the purpose for expanding the funds doesn't get lost in the neighborhood stabilization fund money first of all maxine congresswoman waters i'm in this committee did a fabulous job trying to get those funds they were important concept and the reality is county the hardest hit county as you heard his still to receive those dollars and so there have been challenges we had to we couldn't apply directly because we weren't big enough yet issue and this action just got approved and the money is still out the checks are still in the mail and that is a year after the committee's work in intention to do this to thank mr cardoza mr costa because just down the road from me i represent kern county which we're all in the central valley together my district in kern county has more than fifteen point nine percent unemployment as water without court intervention that we're dealing with legal ramifications of a law without many different changes without direct there will be no way for us to get on the ground and mccarthy is absolutely right the new and my purpose today we purposely labeled it a discussion draft because frankly we don't know the best way to do this we want to include the communities that need to be included certainly we don't this to become a grab bag but we wanted to focus on the areas that are most in distress and yet we wanted to get out because i don't want other areas to be like ours have been waiting for three years and so we have not come up with a perfect method to allocate the dollars and we really leave that we had to put something in the bill to start the discussion but i'm going to leave it to the chairman