[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 76 (Tuesday, May 9, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H4616]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                        MORE ON PROPERTY RIGHTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. LaTourette). Under a previous order of 
the House, the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. McIntosh] is recognized for 
5 minutes.
  Mr. McINTOSH. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman asked a rhetorical question, 
is there anyone who is perhaps left unaffected by this? I think the 
answer is no. I am reminded of another group of people that were 
gravely affected in my district and that is the workers in my district.
  There is a town in the second district of Indiana, Anderson, which 
for years has been a very strong auto manufacturing town. GM has had 
numerous plants there.
  At one point I believe they employed quite a large percent of the 
population in that town, almost 50 percent. As they have been 
downsizing some of their operations, the town of Anderson has been 
seeking to gain new employers. And one of the development projects that 
they sought to bring into their town was the new plant by the Nestle 
Corp. that would diversify some of the jobs in that area, create 
hundreds of new jobs for people in the town of Anderson.
  As they looked at the site, Nestle was considering Anderson and 
another town out of the district in Indiana, a couple other sites, and 
were about ready to locate this new facility there when they discovered 
that there might be a wetlands problem in the land that they were 
looking at to build this new plant. The land had been farmland for 
generations, was not something that you would think of as an 
environmentally sensitive area. But because of the threat that the 
government might come in under the wetlands law and deny them the 
permit to build this plant, the Nestle Co. says, we are going to look 
elsewhere and located the facility somewhere else. Thank goodness we 
were lucky they chose another place in the United States. Sometimes we 
are not so fortunate and we are sending jobs overseas.
  So the working man and woman in this country suffer when these 
regulations cause jobs to be relocated so that they cannot be built in 
our communities, another example of people who are affected by this 
abuse of the regulatory powers.
  Again, let me commend the gentleman from Louisiana for his courage 
and effort in this area. I wholeheartedly support that.
  Mr. TAUZIN. I thank the gentleman, if the gentleman will yield. I 
want to thank him and again particularly express my appreciation for 
accepting the challenge to help us in this investigation, to get to the 
bottom of this, put a stop to it, then eventually to change some laws 
in this country so that the fifth amendment of the Constitution is not 
just some piece of paper, that it is a real and enforceable right for 
Americans who are being deprived of their property without just 
compensation through these regulatory overkills.
  I look forward to working with the gentleman, thank him for joining 
me tonight. And I think we both owe a debt of thanks to the Chair for 
being so patient with us this evening.


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