i am also pleased to say a escambia county is recovering. our beaches are as beautiful as ever were but what we may recover on the outside the scars never leave us. prior to the deep water horizon oil spill i operated a successful real estate business started by my late father in 1977. like any other businesses i've received claims due to the oil spill yet my business has not fully recovered. so much so that ultimately my wife and i had to make the hard decision to merge with another firm after 34 years of existence. i am not alone. there are countless small businesses that have suffered a similar fate. any funds received due to the fines from the clean water act should be directed to coastal counties that were impacted from the spill so investment can be made for long-term recovery of this region and our communities. both environmentally and economically. we must take -- we must now turn his disaster around rounded seize the opportunities before us. we must take the opportunity to learn from our mistakes in reform oboe. we must take the opp

ranking member were kind enough to invite the chairman of our county commission from pensacola, escambiacounty, who was at the front line of this. they did a lot themselves making it up as they went because in many cases the united states government did not have its act together, and a lot of the -- and i'll just close with this. mr. chairman, i'll never forget when i went to one of the centers, the command centers, and it was explained to me that the coast guard was in control 51% and bp was in control 49%. well, that doesn't work, and we saw that didn't work. you got to have a military chain of command and who is at the top of the chain has to have their orders carried out so that's one of the significant lessons that we learn from this spill. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you, senator nelson. nart lautenberg, did you have any quick openings? >> well, if i could trade it for an earlier position in the questioning, i'd like to do that, but -- >> negotiations. >> mr. chairman, thanks very much. we were not -- we know how expedient you'd like to try to make the hearing. it's too impor