The next Caribbean Regional Response
Team (CRRT) meeting will be held March
14-16, 2023 at the US Coast Guard Rio Bayamon housing complex. Here is a link to the meeting location in
Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/nNzMkgVcPcJtWTTZ8
Since this is our first CRRT meeting in over
three years, we expect our schedule to encompass full days on Tuesday through
Thursday of that week, so please make your travel plans accordingly. This will include a coastal Area Committee meeting
on Tuesday morning, followed by
the start of the standing CRRT meeting on Tuesday afternoon. Our tentative plans envision the CRRT meeting
continuing all day on Wednesday and continuing into Thursday afternoon.
Meeting Registration:
In order to ensure access to the USCG facility, we have established a
registration website for meeting attendees.
If you plan on attending, even if you are not yet sure, please
register by Thursday, March 9th, at the following website:
https://march2023crrt.eventbrite.com
The draft agendas for both the Area Committee
meeting and the CRRT meeting are currently under development and will be
distributed soon. If you have topics of
interest or suggestions for the CRRT Meeting agenda, please contact me by phone
at (732) 906-6900 or email at touw.steve@epa.gov, or LT Gabriella Zambrana, USCG CRRT
Coordinator at Gabriella.Z.Zambrana@uscg.mil, or by phone at (305) 415-7072.
As previously announced, we have not
set up a block of hotel rooms for this meeting, so I encourage you to make your
hotel reservations as soon as possible.
As of this morning, I was still able to identify some hotels in the San
Juan metropolitan area offering government rates that are located within a
short driving distance of the meeting location.
Please feel free to contact me for additional information on lodging
options.
As a reminder, federal government and
US Military employees can receive a tax exemption letter from the PR Tourism
Company for their guest room charges. As
I discovered last week, you can now submit your request online at their
website:
https://roomtax.prtourism.com/exemption_reqs.php?lan
The form comes up in Spanish by
default, but Google Chrome will translate it into English. I received my exemption letter within a day
or two.
Additional meeting information will be posted
on the CRRT website at nrt.org/CRRTMarch2023
and disseminated by email. If you are
not currently on the email distribution list and would like to receive future
meeting and other CRRT-related information, please contact me by email. Likewise, if you no longer wish to receive
CRRT-related emails, please let me know and I will remove you from our distribution
lists.
To ensure that all interested representatives
are made aware of this meeting, please pass on this notice to any other members
of your staff or agency/department, and to your local counterparts as well.
We hope to see you next month in Puerto Rico.