12/4/2018

My dear Friend and President, DJT,

What did you and Ben talk about? Is HUD going to take on a new project? I hope so. We've got a housing problem here in No Cal, especially after the Camp Fire. 4% of the kids in the state do not have a home. Can you 2 do something about that?

            Are you looking forward to signing the Frank LoBiondo Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2018? Frank represents Cape May. My father-in-law ended up there at the end of his life. I never visited but I understand it's an old-fashioned beach town. It's prone to flooding now and really hard to evacuate so it might not see an influx of residents anytime soon.

            It's great that Frank's retiring from his job as Congressional Representative for NJ's 2nd District after helping out his "coasties" with $7.9 billion in operating expenses and $2.6 billion in facilities improvements along with some "fast response cutters" and some drones. Best of all his bill eliminates some duplicate regulations on commercial fishing boats about their discharge. Vessels will no longer have to be inspected by the EPA and Coast Guard. I assume Mr. LoBiondo had to attend to numerous details and visit with a whole slew of people to get that bill written in such a way that 94 Senators could vote for it. That's worth celebrating.

It'll be interesting to see what Frank's replacement, Jeff Van Drew, does. Dr. Van Drew might be more interested in health care than the Coast Guard since he is a dentist. He says, "“My top priority in Congress will be to find ways to bring economic opportunities and good jobs to South Jersey,”Politco says even though he calls himself a democrat, he's relatively conservative. He got a hard time from a high school student who caught him fibbing about not getting $$ from the NRA. His 2nd Congressional District is the poorest in the state so they'll be needing lots of help from Mr. Carson.

I'm off to talk about volume with some 5th graders today. Should be fun!

RCA