Less waiting? It was good news when about $14 million of federal disaster relief was delivered to California last June, but there was bad news in its timing, having taken three years to arrive.The payout compensated losses that hit fishermen in the severely delayed 2015-16 Dungeness crab season. And as California Congressman Jared Huffman said in a Jan. 8 press release, "Far too many suffer while waiting for federal relief after unexpected disasters."Huffman is sponsoring new legislation - H.R. 5548, the Fishery Failures: Urgently Needed Disaster Declarations Act - that seeks to speed up the time between declaring a fisheries disaster and delivering the relief funding.The bill's provisions include a setting a 120-day timeline for evaluating disaster declaration requests and a 90-day timeline for paying out relief money after spending plans have been developed.
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