Travel Pool Reports of May 6, 2021

Travel pool #1: Background memo

Good morning from Joint Base Andrews. We're in position and waiting for Biden's arrival. He's scheduled to take off for Louisiana at 10:30 ET.

Meanwhile, here's a memo that the White House is distributing about the trip.

BACKGROUND MEMORANDUM

TO: Out-of-Town Travel Pool

FROM: White House Press Office

DATE: May 6, 2021

RE: Background for the President's Visit to Louisiana

I-10 Calcasieu River Bridge

The I-10 Calcasieu River Bridge opened in 1952 and currently carries over 80,000 daily crossings. As of its last inspection, the bridge is in "poor" condition. After decades of unmet promises, the State is moving forward with a bridge replacement project using a combination of state and federal funding and a public-private partnership financed through bridge tolls. Additional federal investment would help the State reduce tolls or advance unfunded project elements. This bridge is an illustrative example of how existing funding programs are insufficient to meet our Nation's infrastructure needs, and why we need the AJP to reverse this decline.

• AJP Proposal: The AJP proposes $115 billion above the existing surface transportation programs to modernize the bridges, highways, roads, and main streets that are in most need of repair. With respect to Louisiana specifically, of the 12,853 bridges in the state, 1,634, or 12.7%, are classified as structurally deficient. The state has identified needed repairs on 3,251 bridges at an estimated cost of $6.9 billion.

Carrollton Water Plant

The Carrollton Water Plant is home to the New Orleans' Sewerage and Water Board's water purification equipment. The plant is an example of a water purification plant not operating at full capacity. It endures water main breaks and other equipment failures and is the type of plant that would benefit from AJP water infrastructure investment.

• AJP Proposal: Across the country, an estimated six to ten million homes still receive drinking water through lead pipes and service lines. The AJP invests $111 billion in improving water infrastructure and replacing lead service lines. These investments to improve water infrastructure and replace lead service lines will create millions of good jobs, including union and prevailing wage jobs.

The Need for the American Jobs Plan (AJP) in Louisiana

Louisiana's infrastructure received a D+ grade on its Infrastructure Report Card.

· Roads and Bridges: In Louisiana there are 1,634 bridges and over 3,411 miles of highway in poor condition. The American Jobs Plan will devote more than $600 billion to transform our nations' transportation infrastructure and make it more resilient, including $115 billion repairing roads and bridges.

· Public Transportation: Louisianans who take public transportation spend an extra 62.1% of their time commuting and non-White households are 4.3 times more likely to commute via public transportation. 25% of trains and other transit vehicles in the state are past useful life. The American Jobs Plan will modernize public transit with an $85 billion investment.

· Resilient Infrastructure: From 2010 to 2020, Louisiana has experienced 30 extreme weather events, costing the state up to $50 billion in damages. The AJP calls for $50 billion to improve the resiliency of our infrastructure and support communities' recovery from disaster.

· Drinking Water: Over the next 20 years, Louisiana's drinking water infrastructure will require $7.3 billion in additional funding. The AJP includes a $111 billion investment to ensure clean, safe drinking water is a right in all communities.

· Housing: 307,000 renters in Louisiana are rent burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. The Administration is proposing investing over $200 billion to increase housing supply and address the affordable housing crisis.

· Broadband: 14% of Louisianans live in areas where, by one definition, there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds. And 60% of Louisianans live in areas where there is only one such internet provider. 19% of Louisiana households do not have an internet subscription. The American Jobs Plan will invest $100 billion to bring universal, reliable, high-speed, and affordable coverage to every family in America.

· Caregiving: Across the country, hundreds of thousands of older adults and people with disabilities need home and community-based services. This plan will invest $400 billion to help more people access care and improve the quality of caregiving jobs.

· Schools/Child Care Infrastructure: In Louisiana, there is an estimated $553 million gap in what schools need to do maintenance and make improvements and 42% of residents live in a childcare desert. The AJP will modernize our nation's schools and early learning facilities and build new ones in neighborhoods across Louisiana and the country.

· Manufacturing: Manufacturers account for more than 18% of total output in Louisiana, employing 255,000 workers, or 13% of the state's workforce. The AJP will invest $300 billion to retool and revitalize American manufacturers.

· Home Energy: In Louisiana, an average low-income family spends 8-10% of their income on home energy costs forcing tough choices between paying energy bills and buying food, medicine or other essentials. The American Jobs Plan will upgrade low-income homes to make them more energy efficient through a historic investment in the Weatherization Assistance Program, a new Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator to finance building improvements, and expanded tax credits to support home energy upgrades.

· Clean Energy Jobs As of 2019, there were 10,078 Louisianans working in clean energy, and the AJP invests in creating more well-paying union jobs advancing clean energy production by extending and expanding tax credits for clean energy generation, carbon capture and sequestration and clean energy manufacturing.

· Veterans Health: Louisiana is home to over 140,000 veterans, 7.2% of whom are women and 51% of whom are over the age of 65. The AJP calls for $18 billion to improve the infrastructure of VA health care facilities to ensure the delivery of world-class, state of the art care to veterans enrolled in the VA health care system. This includes improvements to ensure appropriate care for women and older veterans.

The Need for the American Families Plan (AFP) in Louisiana

· Higher Education: The average cost of a 2-year degree in Louisiana is $4,200 per year. The American Families Plan will provide at least two years of free community college to students, including Dreamers. It will also increase the maximum Pell Grant awards by approximately $1,400 to support the 108,700 students in Louisiana who rely on Pell for their education. In addition, the AFP will provide support to 16 minority-serving institutions (MSIs) in Louisiana.

· Universal Pre-School: Only 20,500 or 17% of the 123,500 3- and 4-year-olds in Louisiana have access to publicly-funded pre-school. The AFP will provide access to free, high-quality pre-school to all 3- and 4-year-olds in Louisiana, boosting their educational outcomes and allowing more parents to go back to work.

· Investing in Teachers: Just 27% of teachers in Louisiana are teachers of color, while students of color make up 56% of the student population. The AFP will invest $9 billion in our teachers so we address teacher shortages, improve teacher preparation, recruit and develop more teachers of color, and leverage our veteran teachers to help support and train new teachers.

· Child Care: The average annual cost of a child care center for a toddler in Louisiana is $8,200, meaning that a two-parent household with two toddlers would on average need to spend 18% of their income each year on care. The lack of affordable child care also makes it more difficult for women to remain in their jobs, contributing to the more than 20 percent gender gap in workforce participation between mothers and fathers in Louisiana. The AFP will enable low and middle-income families to pay no more than 7% of their income on high-quality child care, generating lifetime benefits for 178,000 children under 5 in Louisiana and helping working families make ends meet.

· Paid Leave: In Louisiana and across the nation, more than 110 million workers lack access to paid family leave and nearly 84 million lack access to paid medical leave. For the country's lowest-wage workers, many of whom are women and workers of color, 95% are without paid family leave and 91% without paid medical leave. AFP will create a national, comprehensive paid family and medical leave program to ensure workers receive partial wage replacement from the government to take time to bond with a new child, care for a seriously ill loved one, deal with a loved one's military deployment, find safety from sexual assault, stalking, or domestic violence, and heal from their own serious illness.

· Child Nutrition: 20% of children in Louisiana live in food insecure households and 35% are obese. AFP will ensure that the nutritional needs of Louisiana's children are met by expanding access to free school meals to an additional 156,000 students and providing 600,000 students with resources to purchase food over the summer.

· Health Care: The American Rescue Plan provided two years of lower health insurance premiums for those who buy coverage on their own; AFP will make those premium reductions permanent. In Louisiana, that means 87,000 uninsured people will gain coverage and 68,100 will on average save hundreds of dollars per year on their premiums. The average American family will save $50 per person per month on health coverage.

· Tax Cuts for Louisiana's Families and Workers: There are 207,000 children or 19% of children under the age of 18 in Louisiana who are considered poor. In addition, 28% of people in Louisiana have household incomes below basic family budget thresholds.

o AFP will extend through 2025 the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit (CTC) increases of $3,000 per child 6-years old and above and $3,600 per child under 6. It will also make the credit fully refundable so that low-income families can now receive the same credit as middle-income families.

o AFP will provide a permanent increase to the temporary Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit expansion enacted in the American Rescue Plan. Families will get back as a tax credit as much as half of their spending on child care for children under age 13, so they can receive a total of up to $4,000 for one child or $8,000 for two or more children. The full 50% reimbursement will be available to families making less than $125,000 a year and all families making between $125,000 and $400,000 will receive a partial credit.

o AFP will also make the Earned Income Tax Credit Expansion (EITC) for childless workers permanent to support low-wage workers.

The Impact of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) in Louisiana

The American Rescue Plan will provide Louisiana with:

• $3 billion in state fiscal relief.
• Almost $2 billion in local fiscal relief.
• More than $2 billion in relief for K-12 schools.
• Economic impact payments of up to $1,400 per person (above the $600 per person provided in December) for more than 2,861,000 adults and 1,334,100 children. This is 91% of all adults in the state and 93% of all children in the state.
• Additional relief of up to $1,600 per child through the Child Tax Credit (CTC) to the families of 1,028,000 children, lifting 94,000 children out of poverty.
• Additional relief of up to $1,000 through the Earned Income Tax.
• Additional relief of up to $6,800 on child care expenses through the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, and more than $772 million to rescue the child care industry
• Credit to 298,000 childless workers, including many in frontline jobs.
• Marketplace health insurance premiums that are $1,784 lower per month for a 60-year old couple earning $75,000 per year.

Travel pool #2: Departure

Biden stepped off Marine One at 10:28.

He was greeted by Colonel Kimberly Welter, Vice Wing Commander, 89th Airlift Wing. He boarded the plane at 10:29 and gave a salute from the top of the stairs. Cedric Richmond, White House advisor and former Louisiana congressman, is on board for the flight.

We were rolling by 10:33.

Principal Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is expected to gaggle on the flight to Louisiana. It will be streamed, so no pool report on that.

Travel pool #3: Louisiana arrival

We touched down at Chennault International Airport at 12:11 CT. (Please note central time zone while we’re here.) Biden stepped off the plane at 12:18 and was greeted by Governor John Bel Edwards and his daughter, Sarah Ellen. Biden and Edwards compared pocket rosaries. They spoke for a few minutes on the tarmac. It’s a warm afternoon and there’s not a cloud in the pale blue sky.

Biden got into the motorcade at 12:23 for his first event of the day in Lake Charles. We’re rolling there now.

As expected, Karine gaggled on the flight here and it was streamed back on the ground.

The White House passes along this list of people traveling with the president on AF1.

• Bruce Reed, Assistant to the President & Deputy Chief of Staff
• Cedric Richmond, Assistant to the President & Senior Advisor & Director of the Office of Public Engagement
• Annie Tomasini, Assistant to the President & Director of Oval Office Operations
• Karine Jean-Pierre, Deputy Assistant to the President & Principal Deputy Press Secretary
• Vinay Reddy, Deputy Assistant to the President & Director of Speechwriting
• Ryan Montoya, Deputy Assistant to the President & Director of Scheduling & Advance
• Stephen Goepfert, Special Assistant to the President & Personal Aide to the President
• Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology

Travel pool #4: Bridge arrival

Soon after leaving the airport, the motorcade passed a line of signs along the road saying "Build Our Bridge."

As we arrived in town, we saw one person waving a large white Trump flag and more people there to support Biden. There was still plywood over some broken windows, leftover from recent hurricane damage.

We arrived at 12:40. Biden will speak from the edge of Lake Charles. In the background, on the other side of the lake, is the Calcasieu River Bridge.

The White House said Biden would participate in a photo line with the following people.

• Louisiana Secretary of Transportation Dr. Shawn Wilson
• State Senator Gerald Boudreaux, Lafayette (LA-Lafayette)
• State Senator Rick Ward, Chair, Senate Transportation Committee (LA-West Baton Rouge)
• State Representative Wilford Carter (LA-Calcasieu)
• State Representative Vincent Pierre, Chair, House Transportation Committee (LA-Lafayette)
• Mayor of Lake Charles Nic Hunter
• Chairman David Sickey, Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana
• Chairman Marshall Pierite, Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana
• Dr. Samuel C. Tolbert, Jr., President, National Baptist Convention of America International
• Louis Reine, President, Louisiana AFL-CIO
• Katie Bernhardt, Chair, Louisiana Democratic Party

Travel pool #5: Event begins

The event began at 12:58, with Gov. Edwards speaking first. Remarks are being streamed/televised/etc.

Travel pool #6: Biden finishes

The president finished speaking at 1:37. He talked with some construction workers in the audience when he was done. We’re back in the vans and rolling at 1:44.

We’re heading back to the airport for our flight to New Orleans.

Travel pool #7: Leaving Lake Charles

We were back at the plane at 1:58. Biden boarded at 2:00. We’re rolling at 2:05.

Next stop New Orleans.

Travel pool #8: New Orleans arrival

During the flight, Cedric Richmond came back to speak off the record.

We touched down at 2:56. Biden stepped off the plane at 3:04.

Biden was welcomed by Senator Bill Cassidy, Senator John Kennedy, Mayor of New Orleans LaToya Cantrell, Congressman-elect Troy Carter. He gave them fist bumps and spoke with the group for several minutes, and Richmond came over to join the conversation.

He then walked to a hanger to participate in a photo line before going to his tour of a New Orleans water plant. Pool is holding in vans.

Photo line participants, per White House:

• State Senator Joseph Bouie, Jr. (LA-New Orleans)
• State Senator Jimmy Harris (LA-New Orleans)
• State Senator Gary L. Smith Jr. (LA-Norco)
• State Senator Ed Price (LA-Ascension Parish)
• State Representative Ken Brass (LA-St. James Parish)
• Helena Moreno, President, New Orleans City Council
• Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome (LA-Baton Rouge)
• Daphne Casmier, Office Manager, City of New Orleans
• Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
• Ike Spears, President, Deep South Political Consulting
• Roderick "Rico" Alvendia, Attorney
• Dr. Silas Lee, Pollster
• Wade Verges, Real Estate Investor

Travel pool #9: Rolling in New Orleans

We didn’t see Biden leave the hanger and return to the motorcade, but we’re rolling toward our next destination at 3:39.

We arrived at the sewage and water board engineering facility at 4. It’s a large complex with several buildings and pools of water to be treated. The afternoon has been heating up — clear skies and 81 degrees according to your pooler’s phone. We’re waiting for Biden to start his tour.

Travel pool #11: Tour begins

Biden shed his tie before starting the tour at 4:15. He stood in front of pools of water that's going to be treated.

"This is an honor," said Ghassan Korban, Executive Director, Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans.

"You are the first president who highlighted and elevated the water infrastructure as an issue for the whole country."

Biden mentioned that he dealt with water issues when he was a city councilman.

Korban said the facility is 74 acres, and it provides drinking water and generates power. The power is for drainage pumps, that's crucial for a city that is largely below sea level.

However, the facility is very old. "The whole system could fail." Korban also said the facility will struggle to meet higher standards for drinking water.

Biden said water is an overlooked part of infrastructure problems. "Infrastructure is all about making life livable for ordinary people."

At 4:27, pool was ushered to the next stop on the tour, the base of a water tower, so the pool was not allowed to hear all of the president's remarks.

Per White House, tour participants include:

• Mayor of New Orleans LaToya Cantrell
• Christy Harowski, Chief of Staff, Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans
• Ghassan Korban, Executive Director, Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans
• Ramsey Green, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for Infrastructure and Chief Resilience Officer for the City of New Orleans
• Chad Lavoie, Sewerage and Water Board Water Purification Superintendent
• Ron Spooner, Interim General Superintendent, Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans
• Kaitlin Tamryk, Engineer, Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans

Travel pool #12: Tour continues

Biden entered the base of a water tower. It's one of two at the facility. The tank holds 2 million gallons, only enough to supply 20 minutes of the city's water needs, according to Chad Lavoie, sewage and water board water purification superintendent.

"We're taking up a collection after this," Biden said while walking to his third stop. Your pooler asked what he was collecting money for. "Water," he said.

At the third stop, there were water pumps that were being repaired.

We loaded back into vans at 4:42 to drive to another part of the facility.

Travel pool #13: Final tour stop

Correction to pool report 11: Biden was a county councilman, not a city councilman.

Biden visited a boiler room at the facility. There was a maze of pipes overhead and along the walls. The boiler room is used to power water pumps.

It was loud, lots of hissing and clanging from the machinery. Biden said a few words as he entered the room, and they were inaudible from just a few feet away.

Biden shook his head when Kaitlin Tymrak, a board employee, said some of the machinery dates to the early 1900s.

The pool was escorted back to it the vans at 4:55 before Biden finished inside.

Next stop, airport for flight back to JBA. We were rolling at 5:02.

Travel pool #14: New Orleans departure

We arrived back at the airplane at 5:25 and Biden boarded a minute later. We were rolling at 5:45.

Next stop JBA.

Travel pool #15: JBA arrival

We touched down at JBA at 8:30 ET. (We're back on eastern time.) Biden descended the stairs at 8:39 and was greeted by Colonel Stephen Snelson, Commander, 89th Airlift Wing. Biden saluted at the bottom of the stairs and they shook hands.

Biden boarded Marine One, which started taxiing at 8:44.

That's all from me, have a good night.