Congressman Landry Delivers for Offshore Workers
Congressman Jeff Landry (R, LA-03) has successfully fought to relieve offshore supply vessel companies from facing unnecessary regulatory burdens. Landry, the House’s leading proponent of domestic oil and gas drilling and their related supply industries, had a provision inserted into H.R. 2838 – the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act of 2011 – that would prohibit the Coast Guard’s “Notice of Arrival” regulations from applying to domestic offshore supply vessels.
The SAFE Port Act of 2006 directed the Coast Guard to develop regulations that require foreign vessels arriving on the Outer Continental Shelf to provide notice of their arrival to the United States Coast Guard. Inexplicably, the regulation subsequently enacted by the Coast Guard, required domestic offshore supply vessels to provide information to the Coast Guard on the vessel’s destination, crew and passenger names, cargo carried by the offshore supply vessel 24 hours before leaving port. This created an unrealistic burden on supply vessels working for the offshore drilling industry, they don’t know, where they’ll be going or what they’ll be carrying before they leave.
“I thank Chairman Mica for joining with me in opposition to the Coast Guard’s inappropriate application of the ‘Notice of Arrival’ regulations. How the Coast Guard confused ‘foreign vessels’ with domestic supply vessels is beyond me. So I’m glad that we’ve put the Coast Guard back onto the right track and saved our domestic supply vessels from having to comply with a regulation that was never intended to apply to them,” said Landry.
Working with the Offshore Marine Service Association (OMSA), Landry raised the issue of the misapplication of the Notice of Arrival Regulations in at least two Coast Guard Subcommittee hearings (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usctn0cvrGo and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D11oi2eQjak). By asking the tough questions, Landry was able to prove that not only did the misapplication of the Notice of Arrival Regulations represent an unnecessary burden on domestic job creators, but he also proved that the Coast Guard could secure the necessary information in other less costly ways.
“Since taking office, I have worked hard to eliminate bureaucratic red-tape that strangle businesses from creating jobs. By eliminating the Notice of Arrival regulation, we save the domestic maritime industry $151 million per year to install equipment that is unnecessary since their current Automatic Identification System already provides the Coast Guard all the information it needs to have maritime domain awareness,” concluded Landry.