NOTICIAS

Washington, D.C.  – U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) today met with Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló to discuss ongoing recovery efforts on the island following Hurricane Maria. After the meeting, Rubio answered questions from the media, and urged Congress to provide more disaster relief to Florida, Texas and Puerto Rico. A partial transcript of Rubio’s remarks is below.
 
RUBIO: The problem for Puerto Rico, and Florida, and Texas is the package is not structured the way that actually helps us entirely. In the case of Florida, for example, there are key industries that need to be addressed. In the case of Puerto Rico, it fails to adequately address the liquidity issue and that is the ability to access the funds quickly to continue basic governmental operations. So the talk around here is we’ll deal with this now and we’ll come back in a few weeks or months and do a third one.
 
And my answer to that is number one they don’t have six to eight weeks on the liquidity side. They have some challenges in just keeping the government functioning. The economy in Puerto Rico is not generating tax revenue. And the second part is, I know from experience the further away you get from these hurricanes, the less of a sense of urgency there is.
 
So it is my hope – I’ve been working with Senators Cruz and Cornyn, I spoke with Senator Schumer this morning – that somehow we can change the House proposal to include some of these additional needs now and not wait another month and a half to address them. Puerto Rico doesn’t have another month and a half to address the liquidity issues that it is confronting. So that’s what we’re focused on today and hopefully we’ll get that achieved.
 
Photos courtesy of Senator Rubio’s office.