[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 61 (Tuesday, May 17, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 17, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       UNFUNDED FEDERAL MANDATES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Allard] is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. ALLARD. Mr. Speaker, Eads, CO, population 847, $20,000 a year, 
$23.60 per person. Columbus, OH, $1.6 billion over 10 years, $850 
annually per household. And finally, Ft. Morgan, CO, population of 
12,000, $44 million.

  What these towns have in common is that they are being required by 
the Federal Government to comply with new broadly defined environmental 
laws and regulations most of the time these regulations improve the 
environment, but in far too many instances they don't even accomplish 
that objective. Without providing any financial assistance, the Federal 
Government continues to pass laws and lay down unfunded mandates that 
are taking up a larger and larger portion of local government budgets. 
While all unfunded mandates are a concern, environmental unfunded 
mandates have especially exploded in the past several years. What's 
particularly interesting about these mandates is they cut across rural, 
urban, and suburban areas. Eads, CO, and Columbus, OH, probably have 
only one thing in common, they're both being slowly strangled by 
Federal unfunded environmental mandates. The unfunded mandate caucus is 
a good example of the breadth of this problem. Their membership ranges 
from the east coast to the west coast with a lot of stops in between. 
Unfunded environmental mandates aren't a regional problem, they're a 
national problem.
  Unfunded environmental mandates are becoming such a problem that 
States are beginning to revolt. Colorado's State Legislature recently 
passed a resolution demanding that the Federal Government ``Cease and 
Desist'' unfunded mandates. Other States are also beginning to take 
action. Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico are in the process of setting up 
constitutional defense councils to fight the Federal Government in 
court. However, the Governor of Ohio, George Voinovich, may have put it 
best when he said that, ``something has to be done or all hell is going 
to break loose.''

  Tonight I would like to begin helping States and businesses do 
something about environmental unfunded mandates by drawing attention to 
their real effect at the local level.
  To find out what effect unfunded environmental mandates are having in 
my district I wrote to every mayor, county commissioner, and State 
legislator in my area asking them to tell me how they are being 
effected. The response I received back was surprising. In less than a 
week I received many responses from towns in my district.
  Perhaps the most disturbing was the response I received from the 
mayor of Aurora, CO. Aurora sends approximately 90 percent of its 
wastewater to a metro wastewater treatment plant. In 1988 they paid 
about 4.2 million dollars for treatment. However, in 5 years that 
amount more than doubled to 9.1 million dollars for treatment of the 
same amount of wastewater because of increased federally mandated 
discharge standards.
  Clearly, we can't continue to place further costs on cities and 
towns. If this special order only makes Congress and the environmental 
protection agency more aware of the problems they are causing then we 
have accomplished something. As the mayor of Loveland, CO, my hometown, 
wrote back to me, ``every new environmental monitoring requirement, 
every new chemical added to a standards list, every new species added 
to the treatened and list results in an unfunded mandate. Loveland is 
proud of its environmental record and will continue to be pro-active. 
While the EPA should remain vigilant regarding problem areas, they 
should adopt policies to allow States and local governments more 
control and flexibility.''

                              {time}  2110

  I would like to take a moment and reflect on the town meetings that I 
have had throughout my congressional district, and I have had a lot of 
town meetings through the 2\1/2\ or now 3\1/2\ years that I have served 
in the House of Representatives. At almost every meeting, I would say 
every meeting I can count on a representative from the city council, 
more likely somebody who is actually serving on the city council at 
that particular time standing up and talking to me about the Federal 
mandates that are being forced down upon them. They are objecting not 
to the objectives of the program, which is to try and keep a safe 
environment, but they are objecting to the extreme conditions that are 
being forced upon their city council, particularly when they are not 
funded, and they view this as the Federal Government doing nothing more 
than passing the costs of their own legislation down to their city 
councils and their county commissioners, and even their State 
legislators and saying, ``You pay for these programs.''
  They are concerned about the consequences of all of these mandates on 
their local budgets and concerned about having to go to their own 
citizens and ask for dollars to pay for those. They do not feel like 
the Congress is living up to its responsibilities by providing the 
dollars that are necessary to take on and fully fund some of these very 
worthwhile programs.
  But they also feel that if the Congress had to pay for them they may 
take a little more judicious approach to the rules and regulations they 
are forcing down on local government.
  Mr. Speaker, I have a letter here that I would like to spend some 
time in going over from the City of Loveland, my hometown. They start 
out a paragraph by explaining that their city water supply is great, it 
is an excellent water supply. I would have to agree with that, because 
when I was starting my veterinary practice in the city of Loveland I 
picked up a part-time job to help them comply with the rules and 
regulations that are being forced upon them so far as the Clean Water 
Act is concerned and the Safe Drinking Water Act. I also was a 
businessman in town who had to rely on high-quality water in order to 
run my tests, I was a veterinarian, in order to run my tests in the 
lab, and in order to autoclave a lot of my instruments. I can tell 
Members from personal experience as a businessman in the City of 
Loveland that they had some of the best water around. In fact, my 
autoclave that I used to sterilize my instruments with for my 
veterinary business stated that in order for it to assure long life, 
and so that it would not accumulate a lot of deposits in the autoclave 
that we should use distilled water. I never once used distilled water 
because the city water drinking supply in Loveland was that pure. It 
compared closely to a bottle of distilled water that you would go down 
to your grocery store and buy.

  That was my personal experience as a businessman. That is my 
experience as a health officer for the City of Loveland. We sent out 
samples periodically to test the contents of the drinking water, and it 
came back remarkably pure. So from my own personal experience I can 
testify to the fact that the water in the City of Loveland was 
extremely high quality.
  But they go on to explain in this particular letter that recent 
changes in the regulations have resulted in an estimated loss of 
treatment plant production capacity of 3 million to 6 million gallons 
per day, and the reason for this 3 million to 6 million gallon per day 
loss was because of these new safe drinking water regulations. They go 
on to elaborate that the water customers paid for a 30 million gallon 
per day plant, but now it is a 24 million gallon per day to 27 million 
gallon per day plant because of the lost capacity from those 
regulations.
  They go on to say further that the EPA mandates through regulations 
are forcing them to periodically test for organic chemicals in their 
treated drinking water. They point out that only 1 out of 100 different 
organic chemicals have even been detected, and that was a chlorine 
compound resulting from the required chlorination of their water. 
Monitoring costs are continuing to go up, they explain. EPA provides 
little freedom to States or local governments to meet the intent of 
regulations.
  Another issue facing the city of Loveland as well as other mountain 
communities along the front range of the Rockies has to do with 
wastewater treatment facilities and acute and chronic exposure to 
discharges. They go on to explain that the extreme conservatism of EPA 
standards does not take into account site-specific conditions and 
operating techniques. Many cities have undoubtedly spent money to 
upgrade plants to meet an EPA nationwide standard when it would not 
have been necessary had EPA allowed greater flexibility to the 
facility, meaning that they would very easily have been able to meet 
those standards and meet the objectives by having clean water if they 
just had been allowed to have the flexibility to meet those standards.

                              {time}  2120

  I would like to share another letter with the House from the city of 
Aurora. They go on to explain that as required by the Clean Water Act 
of Aurora Utilities Department submitted a national pollution discharge 
elimination system permit for the municipal separate storm sewer system 
to the State of Colorado in 1992.
  The initial costs associated with the permit were estimated to be 
$1.3 million for the 5-year permit term. However, 2 years later the 
current projection is closer to $2 million.
  Now, the increased amount, they go on to explain, can be attributed 
to further permit conditions added by the State. Now, as they 
understand the problem, they explained it to me in their correspondence 
with me, these additional permit conditions are due to pressure from 
the Federal Government on State agencies to incorporate additional 
requirements not specified by the Federal regulation, and I think this 
brings up another concern that we need to talk about in the House of 
Representatives.
  More and more frequently it is being called to my attention that we 
have regulators out there who are taking the attitude that we are going 
to go ahead and force these rules and regulations on cities and 
counties and businesses or States, and if Congress does not like what 
they are doing, then they can pass laws that prohibit us from doing it. 
Now, our Founding Fathers had a completely different attitude in mind, 
that the regulators would not be promulgating rules and regulations 
unless it was specifically authorized in some piece of legislation, and 
what the current trend seems to be is that they are going and 
continuing to act assuming a considerable amount of power which I do 
not think was granted in the Constitution. I think by taking this type 
of action that it is in total disregard of what many of our founding 
Fathers had in mind as far as the Constitution was concerned and as far 
as the relationship between the Congress and the executive branch. They 
had in mind that it was up to the Congress to pass legislation, to pass 
laws. It was not up to the bureaucracy to go ahead and implement laws 
and then worry about it and then have the Congress go back and revert 
their policy.
  It changes the burden of proof. It changes the burden of action, and 
that burden of action must first start with the House of 
Representatives and then the regulators or the bureaucracy should go 
ahead and pick up and promulgate those rules and regulations 
specifically authorized in any legislation that is passed in the House 
of Representatives.

  They go on in this letter from the city of Aurora to explain that a 
more indirect yet equally concerning costly impact is the rising cost 
of treating effluent in order to meet federally mandated discharge 
standards.
  The city of Aurora sends approximately 90 percent of its wastewater 
to the Metro Wastewater Reclamation District's plant for treatment. 
Then they go on to explain the Metro fees are about $4.2 million in 5 
years. Again that amount has doubled, as I explained, to $9.14 million 
for treatment for essentially the same amount of wastewater.
  Mr. Speaker, I have another letter here from Arapahoe County in 
Colorado. I just finished sharing some thoughts from a couple of 
municipalities that have written my office and expressed their concerns 
at our request.
  Arapahoe County, CO, says that is the environmental area, two of the 
most significant examples that they are struggling to deal with relate 
to the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, sometimes 
referred to as NPDS, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency's 
pending requirements to improve the flood-plain maps.
  The FEMA situation they point out is most ridiculous.
  FEMA currently has flood-plain maps which graphically depict the 
boundaries of blood plains throughout our country. Now, FEMA has 
announced to us that they plan to convert, announced to us, meaning 
Arapahoe County, that they plan to convert to digital computer-
generated maps and that digitizing involves a very expensive surveying 
technique. The announced reason is to increase the accuracy of the 
flood-plain boundaries, a worthy goal, but FEMA's technical problems in 
implementing will make the map less accurate, and the burden and 
expenses for correcting FEMA's mistakes will rest with the local 
governments.
  They go on to explain in this letter to my office that they are 
providing us with three maps, and they explain that the first map is an 
example of the current flood-plain map known as the flood insurance 
rating or FIRM. They go on to explain street alignments are actually 
as-built streets and explain that a homeowner interested in knowing 
where the flood plain is in relation to his house can fairly easily 
make the determination.

  They go on to explain that map 2 is the digitized version of the same 
area, and that map 3 is an overlay of the two maps, and they go on to 
explain if you look at the overlay you can see that the streets and 
flood-plain boundaries do not line up. In some cases, there are wide 
discrepancies due to survey areas and other conversion problems. When 
this is pointed out to FEMA, the response was the county must do the 
expensive survey work necessary to correct the error in FEMA's work.
  The simple cure to this pending disaster is suspend issuance of the 
improved map until the mistakes are fixed. Well, obviously that is 
another example of some of the mandates that are going on that are 
impacting counties.
  I have another letter from a small community in Colorado, Lamar, CO, 
and they expressed their concerns about the Safe Drinking Water Act. 
They go on to explain that they are required to provide drinking water 
samples to the State health department for testing, and they are 
required to do this on a very frequent basis, and they are now even 
required to submit new samples all of which must meet certain testing 
criteria.
  They had a problem in meeting some of their deadlines, and despite an 
unblemished record of providing samples in a timely fashion, despite 
consistently good test results, the city of Lamar was forced to 
purchase and run an ad in the local newspaper stating that they had 
violated the provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act because they had 
not had one of their samples delivered as was customarily delivered 
through the many years that they have spent complying with the rules 
and regulations. The boilerplate ad did not provide space for an 
explanation of the violation.
  Well, as a result of that, they had a lot of concerned citizens in 
their town calling them up and expressing concerns about this 
boilerplate ad. In reality, it was not the city's fault, and in 
reality, there was not an actual problem there, because the city had 
consistently had good test results and made every effort to try and 
comply.
  Many times, even though these good-faith efforts are attempted, 
cities are faced with fines that go up to $10,000 a day. Now, if you 
are talking about a large community like New York or Denver or Los 
Angeles, $10,000 a day is not much. But if you are talking about a very 
small community like Lamar, for example, or you are talking about some 
of the communities whose total budget may be $50,000 or $100,000, it is 
an unreasonable fine to impose on those communities, and it is not 
necessary to impose that heavy a fine if they run into problems with 
complying with the environmental regulations.
  I think that this is one area that we need to look at seriously when 
we come around to reauthorizing, for example, the Clean Water Act or 
passing amendments as far as the Safe Drinking Water Act are concerned.
  I have shared with the House of Representatives this evening a number 
of situations that have come to my attention in my district.

                              {time}  2130

  This is in response to a consistent stream of complaints that I 
received in my town meetings and correspondence sent to my office from 
many small communities in the district I am privileged to represent. It 
is a rural community, and we have a lot of small communities that are 
struggling, struggling economically and struggling with all these rules 
and regulations. What is most disturbing to them is that even though 
they are complying with the standards, that the standards are being 
moved beyond common sense. They say, ``We are very proud of the fact 
that we have a good water supply, but because of some of the rules and 
regulations getting so extreme, they are moving out of the realm of 
common sense.''
  Something needs to be done to call the attention of Congress to the 
problems that we are having.
  So, Mr. Speaker, it is because of their concerns and because of their 
correspondence to my office that I have taken time this evening to talk 
to the House about those problems happening to small communities in the 
4th Congressional District of Colorado.
  I am going to be fighting with a number of other congressman to try 
to bring back a perspective of common sense. There is no doubt in my 
mind that we need to work hard to protect our environment and make sure 
that there is a future for generations of Americans. But to go to the 
extreme that we expect a huge expenditure by communities with little 
results to show for those rules and regulations is not good common 
sense.
  Mr. Speaker, that is all they are asking, that we give them more 
local control, that we put a little more faith in their judgment to do 
what is best for their electorate, the people who elected them to 
office.
  So again, Mr. Speaker, I want to thank you for allowing me this time 
for special orders, and I will continue to press this very important 
issue because it is important to the small communities in my district.
  In talking with Members of Congress, I perceive this as a national 
problem, and we will continue to be working on this very important 
issue.

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