Travel Promotion, Enhancement, and Modernization Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

As the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade, I am pleased that this bipartisan bill, H.R. 4450, the Travel Promotion, Enhancement, and Modernization Act of 2014, was reported out of the full Energy and Commerce Committee last week.

The bill, which authorizes the Brand USA program through fiscal year 2020, is an important achievement for our committee. I appreciate the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton) and the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Terry), the chairman of our committee and subcommittee, and the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman), the full committee ranking member, for helping to bring this legislation to the floor.

I strongly support Brand USA's mission of promoting international travel to the United States, and I have heard from travel and tourism professionals across my district about the need to reauthorize this program, but it is not just the Chicago area that benefits.

Brand USA supports an estimated 53,000 jobs and $3.4 billion in visitor spending each year from coast to coast, according to the U.S. Travel Association.

I would like to thank Mr. Bilirakis and Mr. Welch, the sponsors of H.R. 4450, for their continued commitment to the promotion of international tourism. The sponsors worked with me to make some important improvements to this legislation during the committee markup process.

The amendment we made to the bill will make Brand USA even more accountable and economically viable, moving forward.

Due to our efforts, the bill incorporates several recommendations that the Government Accountability Office made in a 2013 report. The Department of Commerce is now required to establish specific publicly available timeframes and conditions for how Brand USA revises and resolves disagreements related to its in-kind contribution policy.

Having a set policy will not only promote greater transparency, but it will also, in the words of GAO, ``enable productive interactions and facilitate collaboration.''

GAO has also suggested that Brand USA be directed to develop a plan that specifies timeframes, methodologies, and data sources for measuring its performance and the campaign's impact.

By explicitly requiring those criteria, the bill now gives the organization more direction on the type of information it should collect and establishes metrics that can more effectively determine the success of the program.

I was glad that the bill's sponsors proposed lowering the cap on in-kind contributions in the underlying bill, and I am thankful that Mr. Bilirakis joined me to offer an amendment to lower the cap even further during the full committee markup last week.

Every contribution to Brand USA, whether public or private, cash or in-kind, is important to the organization's ongoing success, but I believe that the program is in the best possible position to maintain and build on its success through robust cash contributions by the private sector.

Brand USA's continued long-term success is essential to communities that--like my district--realize the economic and cultural benefits of tourism and travel. Brand USA has been successful in its first few years, and I firmly believe that this legislation improves the program even more.

Again, I applaud Brand USA for its ongoing efforts to encourage people from all over the world to enjoy everything our country has to offer, and I assure the chairman of our subcommittee that we will benefit not just coast to coast, but also the center of the country as well.

I thank the sponsors for their continued efforts to ensure the longevity of this valuable program and strongly encourage my colleagues to support this important bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. I have no more speakers, but I want to just make a couple of comments. I think in addition to this being a really important bill and recognized in a bipartisan way, I hope Members on both sides of the aisle will realize how good it feels when we work together, and maybe this could be the beginning or a model for how we can deal with legislation. There were some changes to the bill. We sat down. We agreed on them. We worked it out, and we have a product at the end of the day. It is called compromise. It is not a dirty word. We have achieved, I think, an excellent product.

The other thing I wanted to mention, we have talked about Big Sur, Carmel, Las Vegas, and other places. I just wanted to say that I am kind of pushing an idea for an organization called To Chicago, which is our tourism bureau to bring people to Chicago, especially for the summer. I thought a really good idea would be to promote: Come to Chicago, swim in Chicago, no sharks. And so I thought I would use this opportunity to push my ``no sharks'' idea for Chicago. You could add ``no salt'' as well, but I thought particularly ``no sharks.'' We have beautiful beaches in Chicago. So I am trying to get To Chicago under the banner of brand Chicago to promote my good idea of no sharks.

But there are so many ideas I think that we have for many small communities. I was in the delta of Louisiana at the original blues bars and blues restaurants down there, and all of us have something wonderful and unique in our communities. That is what Brand USA is about, to bring tourists not only to the likely suspects of places but to so many of our communities so they get the real flavor of the people, the diversity, the color, the smell, the feel, and the sound of the United States of America. So this is a great piece of legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to continue to reserve the balance of my time.

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