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| Wilson Requests Cement Tariff Relief in Letter to President |
September 01, 2005 |
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| Albuquerque, NM – After a conversation with Department of Commerce officials today to discuss her August 12 letter to Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, and in light of a likely increase in demand due to Hurricane Katrina, Congresswoman Heather Wilson today decided to address her concerns directly to President Bush.
Text of letter to President Bush:
September 1, 2005
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear President Bush,
I respectfully request that you suspend the $57-per-ton tariff on imported Mexican cement.
There is already a cement shortage in New Mexico and elsewhere and I fear that the massive amount of cement that will be required to reconstruct the Golf Coast is going to result in an acute nationwide cement shortage that could undermine the health of the country’s construction and housing sectors as well as hamper critically needed Gulf Coast reconstruction efforts. Currently, New Mexico’s only cement plant, that serves the construction industries through two distribution channels in Albuquerque, New Mexico and El Paso, is rationing its supply of cement causing a strain on New Mexico’s housing and construction sectors.
Today, the United States can only produce about 75 percent of the cement it needs using existing plants. We import the rest. But cement that otherwise would be shipped to the United States is being redirected to projects in China, a major supplier of cement, where there is a building boom, and to rebuilding in South Asia in the aftermath of last year`s tsunami.
On August 12, 2005 I wrote to Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez and requested that he take decisive action to suspend the tariff on imported cement before many contractors and home builders in my district will be forced to lay off workers because they cannot get cement for jobs. The Commerce Department’s September 1, 2005 decision to consider reducing tariffs imposed on the Mexican cement company Cemex, from 54.97 percent to 40.54 percent, is inadequate, especially in light of the massive amount of cement that will be necessary to rebuild the Gulf Coast.
The price of cement is largely determined by the transportation costs involved in delivering the cement. While most cement imports that come from Asia take about 44 days to reach a U.S. port, a Mexican shipment can reach my central New Mexico district and the Gulf Coast in less than a week.
Cement is an important building block of economic growth and I ask that you take decisive action to suspend the tariff on imported Mexican cement in order to facilitate critically important Gulf Coast reconstruction efforts and before a nationwide cement shortage results in serious harm to our Nation’s economic well being.
Sincerely,
Heather Wilson
Member of Congress
HW: ch |
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