Snowe: Funding critical for aging fleet

WASHINGTON – If the U.S. Coast Guard is to meet its goal of improving its aging fleet within the next 20 years, Congress must honor the administration’s budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, Coast Guard officials said this week.

A joint report released by the Coast Guard and the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said that without the money, the Coast Guard would have to continue patrolling the open ocean in decrepit boats, and that would present the “single greatest risk” to homeland security, Adm. Thomas Collins, the Coast Guard commandant, testified Wednesday.

But to speed modernization, President Bush must ask Congress to increase spending and Congress must dole out money more quickly, said Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Fisheries and Coast Guard.

Results of the study conducted at Snowe’s request show an outlook as stormy as the weather off the coast of Maine on a bad day. Although aging boats are not a new problem, Margaret Wrightson, the General Accounting Office’s director of homeland security and justice issues, said they’ve become an increasing issue because of new security threats.

“We are at the point of almost a crisis,” Snowe said of the fleet. “The aircraft and cutters are old enough to apply for Social Security.”

Bush’s proposed $7.5 billion Coast Guard budget represents an 8 percent increase from this year. But that still isn’t enough money to speed up modernization of the Coast Guard’s oldest ships, Snowe said. She said the administration’s request would actually delay the modernization program an additional two years, to 22 years. But neither she nor other senators pressing to increase the Coast Guard budget said how much more was needed.

Collins said the budget “supports the goals of the president’s national strategy for homeland security” because 90 percent of the total funding would go for homeland security.

In June 2002, the Coast Guard awarded a contract to two private companies worth $17 billion over two decades to upgrade ships and purchase nearly 100 new ships, 35 aircraft, 76 unmanned surveillance planes and nearly three dozen helicopters.

However, the contract assumed the so-called Deepwater project would receive annual funding of $500 million. But since the contract was granted, appropriations have dropped well-below that estimate, according to the General Accounting Office.

The program would “increase the ability of the Coast Guard to serve all of the people in the U.S., including people in Maine,” said Coast Guard spokeswoman Jolie Shifflet.

Two of the cutters slated to receive substantial improvements are the USS Tahoma and the USS Campbell, both stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery. Cutters perform a number of offshore duties, including patrolling fisheries for law enforcement, intercepting drugs, protecting the homeland and rescuing boaters.

The Tahoma and the Campbell, each 270 feet long, arrived in Maine from New Bedford, Mass., last fall and are two of the five boats in New England that are first in line for improvements.

Although Adm. Collins testified that the Coast Guard is certain it will “meet and exceed” its operations goals in Maine, Snowe said it needs to “recognize some realities” in funding. Collins suggested the Coast Guard could transfer money from operations to finance the modernization projects, but Snowe countered that he should not shortchange other critical programs, such as port security.