Page 17: of Marine News Magazine (March 2022)

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Q&A stay united, and you can’t start think- it’s a crisis or when it’s right in your even beyond that. And what are ing about it or dealing with it when face. You have to be preparing for it.

your plans to achieve them?

JC: I want to go beyond talking about discouraging Jones Act waivers, or modernizing regulations to make sure they keep up with technology, or mak- ing sure that the Coast Guard has a ? eet of waterways commerce cutters to keep our rivers and navigation channels open for business. Those are all impor- tant things that we’re going to be doing.

When you look at the bit bigger picture, what are we trying to do? We are here to be the industry’s advocate resource united voice, and we want to make sure that we are proactively iden- tifying and shaping, in? uencing issues at the federal level, at the state level, at the regional level, at the international level, that affect our members ability to succeed in a changing environment.

We are here to help members deal with the stuff that is in front of us right now, like getting to 100% ? eet certi? - cation on Subchapter M, making sure that the Corp of Engineers is not issu- ing permits for docs that are going to cause navigation safety problems and impact the ability of moving the U.S. harvest to market. But we’re also here to really support our members in plan- ning and preparing for those longer- term challenges.

We talked about decarbonization, we talked about ensuring the work- force of the future, and those are things where there are concrete ac- tions we can take now and we are tak- ing now. And it’s also about working to make sure that we have what we need in the future, because the really hard stuff, you can’t do it alone. You have to partner with coalitions, you have to get ahead of it, you have to www.marinelink.com MN 17|