[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 77 (Wednesday, May 10, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6443-S6447]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
INTERSTATE TRANSPORTATION OF MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE ACT
The Senate continued with the consideration of the bill.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The pending question before the Senate is the
substitute amendment reported by the Committee on Environment and
Public Works to S. 534.
Is there further debate on the bill?
The Senator from Rhode Island is recognized.
Mr. CHAFEE. Mr. President, this is the Graham amendment?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. What is before the Senate is the committee-
reported substitute at this point.
Mr. GRAHAM addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida is recognized.
Mr. GRAHAM. I thank the Chair.
Amendment No. 752
(Purpose: To revise the provision relating to State-mandated disposal
services)
Amendment No. 753
(Purpose: To provide that a law providing for State-mandated disposal
services shall be considered to be a reasonable regulation of commerce)
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I send to the desk two amendments and ask
for their immediate consideration.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Does the Senator wish these amendments to be
considered en bloc?
Mr. GRAHAM. The Senator requests that they be considered en bloc.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The clerk
will report.
The bill clerk read as follows:
The Senator from Florida [Mr. Graham] proposes en bloc
amendments numbered 752 and 753.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of
the amendments be dispensed with.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The amendments are as follows:
Amendment No. 752
On page 63, strike line 4 and all that follows through page
64, line 2, and insert the following:
``(e) State-Mandated Disposal Services.--A political
subdivision of a State may exercise flow control authority
for municipal solid waste and for recyclable material
voluntarily relinquished by the owner or generator of the
material that is generated within its jurisdiction if, prior
to May 15, 1994, the political subdivision--
``(1) was responsible under State law for providing for the
operation of solid waste facilities to serve the disposal
needs of all incorporated and unincorporated areas of the
county;
``(2) is required to initiate a recyclable materials
recycling program in order to meet a municipal solid waste
reduction goal of at least 30 percent;
``(3) has been authorized by State statute to exercise flow
control authority and had implemented the authority through
the adoption or execution of a law, ordinance, regulation,
contract, or other legally binding provision; and
``(4) had incurred, or caused a public service authority to
incur, significant financial expenditures to comply with
State law and to repay outstanding bonds that were issued
specifically for the construction of solid waste management
facilities to which the political subdivision's waste is to
be delivered.
(5) the authority under this subsection shall be exercised
in accordance with Section 401z(b)(4).
____
Amendment No. 753
On page 65, line 10, strike ``or (d)'' and insert ``(d), or
(e)''.
On page 65, line 3, strike ``or (d)'' and insert ``(d), or
(e)''.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, these two amendments represent technical
refinements to a provision of the bill which appears on pages 63
through 65, which I understand have been agreed to by both sides of the
aisle, and I ask for their immediate consideration.
Mr. CHAFEE. Mr. President, indeed, they have been agreed to by this
side of the aisle, and we are prepared to accept them.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there further debate on the amendments Nos.
752 and 753? Is there objection to the amendments? If not, the
amendments are agreed to.
So the amendments (Nos. 752 and 753) were agreed to.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida is recognized.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I wish to express my appreciation to
Senator Chafee, who, in his usual gracious manner, has been so helpful
in working through these two technical amendments as well as having
assisted the committee in bringing to the floor this important piece of
legislation.
I would also like to commend the chair of the subcommittee with
specific responsibility, Senator Smith of New Hampshire, and the
ranking minority member, Senator Baucus, and Senator Lautenberg for
their courtesies in the development of these amendments and other
provisions in the legislation. I would like to take this opportunity to
make a few remarks on the general subject of title II of this
legislation which is the provision relating to flow control.
Mr. CHAFEE. I wonder if the Senator, before he gets into that, would
like to move to reconsider the vote by which the amendments were agreed
to.
Mr. GRAHAM. In further thoughtfulness on the part of the Senator, I
move to reconsider the votes by which the two amendments were agreed to
en bloc.
Mr. CHAFEE. I move to table that motion.
The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.
Mr. GRAHAM. I thank you, Mr. President, and I thank Senator Chafee.
This legislation in title II, which is the title to which my remarks
will be directed, raises again the fundamental question that this
Federal Government has dealt with throughout its history, and that is
the appropriate role of the State government and the National
Government. In this case, it raises, in stark relief, the question of
who should decide an issue as basic to our public welfare as the
disposition of garbage.
I start from a general presumption that that level of government
which is closest to the people who will be affected by the action
should be able to control the action and therefore I have a general
predisposition toward local and State government having responsibility
and control. In this case, that predisposition also happens to be in
the historical responsibility of local government for the control of
their solid waste and its disposition.
Let me turn to a little background of how we got to the legislation
that is before us today. I will use for purposes of my examples
primarily illustrations from my State of Florida but I believe that
similar examples could be drawn from any of the other some 35 States
[[Page S6444]] which have adopted a flow control process to direct
their solid waste.
In the case of my State, this involvement was largely driven by
environmental and particularly water-related concerns and the impact
that those proper considerations of environmental circumstances would
have on the public health. I was concerned in reading the report of the
committee that the statement is made that the principal issue relative
to flow control is economics. In my judgment, while economics are
certainly concerns, the statement made on page 6 that ``The primary
factor driving the imposition of flow control ordnances is economics''
confuses the ends with the means. The economics are a means of
achieving the end.
In the case of my State, the end was to have appropriate sites that
would protect the environment and protect public health. My State is
one which is growing rapidly. We are adding some 300,000 people every
year, having just crossed the 14 million size. Eighty percent of the
population of the State of Florida lives in the coastal zone, basically
a thin strip of land over pools of water. We depend upon that
subsurface water for all of our purposes--human consumption, economic
purposes, agriculture--for this large and growing population and the
economy which supports that population.
A number of years ago, it was recognized that if we continued to grow
at this rapid rate and continued to dispose of our solid waste in the
traditional pattern that we were going to endanger our underground
water supply. And, therefore, the State passed a comprehensive solid
waste management law approximately a decade ago, a law that I am proud
to say has been described as one of the most progressive in the Nation
and has been a model for other States. That solid waste management law
gave a great deal of responsibility to local government, particularly
counties, to implement solid waste disposal programs. The goal was to
remove a substantial amount of solid waste from landfills and into
other disposal methods or into landfills that met a very high standard
of environmental protection.
The authority to implement flow control already existed in Florida
and thus counties used it as a tool to develop a integrated solid waste
management plan that was in compliance with the State law and that
addressed the threat of ground water contamination from the more
traditional, less protected landfills.
It was in this context, Mr. President, that 2 years ago the U.S.
Supreme Court issued an opinion, called the Carbone opinion, which
essentially stated that States were without the authority to grant flow
control power to their local governments, because the use of that flow
control could constitute a restraint on interstate commerce.
That came as a surprise to many who felt that there were few items
that were as indigenously local as the direction of garbage. The
Supreme Court reached that conclusion, but went on to provide that it
was now the responsibility of Congress to set whatever standards it
felt appropriate in order to authorize local governments to continue
exercising their flow control authority.
If I could quote from the concurring opinion of Justice O'Connor who,
in joining the majority in the Carbone opinion stated that, ``It is
within Congress' power to authorize local imposition of flow control.
Should Congress revisit this area, and enact legislation providing a
clear indication that it intends States and localities to implement
flow control, we will, of course, defer to that legislative judgment.''
So what we have before us today is the legislative judgment carrying
out that empowerment by the U.S. Supreme Court. I am concerned that the
judgment that is represented in title II of this bill is a narrow
judgment. It is a judgment which essentially says that as the first
proposition local governments are denied the authority to engage in
flow control; that is the ability to direct their solid waste.
As a second point, it provides that those communities which have
already engaged in flow control prior to the date of the Supreme Court
opinion, or prior to the date of May 15, 1994, which was the date upon
which this initial version of legislation was first proposed, that
those communities would be allowed to continue to exercise flow control
for the period of time that was required for that community to meet its
financial responsibility but in no cases longer than 30 years after the
passage of this legislation. The implication of that is that no
community which was not engaged in flow control prior to May 15, 1994,
would be sanctioned to do so and those communities which were so
engaged but which met their financial obligations, such as paying off
the bonds that were necessary to construct a modern landfill or a solid
waste recycling plant or an incinerator, that once those financial
obligations were met they would lose their authority to exercise flow
control and no community, regardless of circumstance, would have flow
control authority for more than 30 years.
I am deeply concerned about the philosophy that says that the Federal
Government is going to assume that degree of policy control offer an
activity which has been so historically local and which, by all of its
characteristics, should continue to be local.
Mr. CHAFEE. I wonder if I could present the counterargument to the
Senator's proposal. The Senator is saying that it goes against his
grain and his philosophical belief that a local community cannot impose
so-called flow control; a local community cannot say: We are going to
build an incinerator. We are going to bond it with revenue bonds, with
the revenue coming from the requirement that, for everybody in this
community and every business, all trash must go to this central
facility. And the reason we, the town, say that, or the city says that,
is because we have to pay off the bonds to pay for the facility.
And the Senator finds it disturbing, and understandably so, that in
this legislation we are saying, ``No, you cannot do that anymore.
Oh, yes, you can do it if you have some bonds outstanding.''
Let us say the bonds have 18 years to go and that is the expected
life of the facility. But beyond that, no, you cannot have this
proposal. It is a little bit like, I suppose the Senator would say, Big
Brother saying to the town of Lakeland, or whatever it is in Florida,
whatever the town might be, ``You can't do that.''
Here is the other side of the argument. The other side of the
argument says the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by
our courts says you cannot do this to start with; that no way can you
be able to issue these requirements that everybody in this local
community must go to point A to dump the trash. You cannot have some
local hauler come in and take it anyplace--to take it to Rhode Island,
take it to Texas, take it someplace else, no. The Supreme Court of the
United States says that it is unconstitutional to have restrictions
that we provide for in this legislation.
I look at it another way. Instead of saying it is difficult to
comprehend why Big Brother should step in and say why you cannot have
flow control or you can only have it for a limited period, instead the
Congress of the United States is saying, ``Despite the fact that flow
control is against the Constitution of the United States because it
interferes with interstate commerce, we are still going to let you have
it in order to pay off your bonds.''
So I look on it more as the Congress giving rather than the Congress
taking it away.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I think, respectfully, that is not a
proper reading of what the Supreme Court said in the Carbone case. I
will just refer you to page 8 of the committee report which quotes the
language of Justice O'Connor in which she states quite unequivocally:
It is within Congress' power to authorize local imposition
of flow control.
Mr. CHAFEE. That is right.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I continue the quote:
Should Congress revisit this area and enact legislation,
providing a clear indication that it intends States and
localities to implement flow control, we will, of course,
defer to that legislative judgment.
So we have a range of judgments that we can make, including that it
is appropriate for State and local governments to continue to implement
flow control, those communities which had done it in the past and those
which might like to do it in the future and
[[Page S6445]] those which have done it in the past which have paid
off indebtedness and wish to continue to utilize it. It is within our
power to place the decisionmaking as to whether to use flow control or
not in the hands of literally tens of thousands of local government
officials, as opposed to centralizing that decision in Washington, with
the judgment that is contained in title II of this legislation, which
essentially is: Thou shalt not engage in flow control unless you were
doing it before May 1994 and, even then, only for the period necessary
to pay off your indebtedness and, in no case, more than 30 years from
now.
Mr. CHAFEE. I dispute the Senator's characterization of the Congress
or the Senate saying thou shalt not engage in flow control. It is not
us that is saying that. The Supreme Court has said, ``You can't do it.
And, indeed, if you try and do it, you are violating the
Constitution.''
But the Supreme Court goes on to say, ``But if you, the Congress,
want to give them that power, then you have the ability to do so.''
I do not think it is us imposing a ``thou shalt not'' on them. In
effect, we are coming to their rescue. It is true, we could be a
broader rescue mission than we are currently on. The Senator aptly has
pointed out, all we are doing is limiting our rescue mission; all we
are saying is we will rescue those towns that have already made the
commitment. They had imposed flow control saying everything had to go
to this central landfill or central incinerator, and we are saying you
can keep it up because you issued bonds thinking the law was the way it
was, you did it fairly, and along comes the Supreme Court which says it
is against the Constitution. OK, we will come and help you out.
That is what we are doing. We are not doing it, as the Senator is
aptly saying, in perpetuity. We are not saying whatever you want to do
in the towns is OK. We are limiting it.
But it is not us who said no to them to start with.
Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I say to my friend and colleague, the
Supreme Court has clearly stated, as it does in many of these
instances, that activities which are violative of the interstate
commerce clause can be made constitutionally acceptable if Congress
sets the standards and clearly grants the conditions for that
authority.
Mr. CHAFEE. Absolutely.
Mr. GRAHAM. Justice O'Connor has stated it quite explicitly that we
have that authority, and I am suggesting that prudence would lead us to
a position that would say, let us exercise the authority that the
Supreme Court has held that we can possess under the Constitution in a
way that decentralizes decisionmaking, that lets local communities,
with locally elected officials, take into account their local
conditions.
For instance, we are about to say to one of the fastest growing
communities in my State, Volusia County, which contains cities such as
Daytona Beach and Ormond Beach and DeLand--a very rapidly growing
area--that they cannot engage in flow control as a means of managing
their solid waste in such a way as to give maximum protection to their
vulnerable underground water supply.
I do not know why we in Washington feel that we know more about the
sensibilities, the economics, the values, the environment, the public
health threat of the people in Volusia County than their locally
elected officials. What purpose are we serving by being so narrow in
our willingness to offer--my State just a few years ago was one of the
smallest States in the Union. In fact, we are celebrating our 150th
anniversary of statehood. When we came into the Nation in the year
1845, we had only slightly more than 40,000 people. One hundred fifty
years later, we have 14 million people. Twenty years from now we will
have 19 million people. They are occupying the same piece of property
with the same environmental circumstances.
Many communities, about 15 to 20 in my State, have said, ``We need to
do a better job of protecting our water supply and inappropriate
landfills.'' Here is what we are going to do for the citizens of my
community with the support of the citizens of my community through
their elected representatives to do so. We are now about to say that
everybody who did not get on to that train, authorized flow control
prior to May 1994, are going to be forever shut off.
I do not understand what public purpose we are advancing by denying
them the right to do so.
Mr. CHAFEE. I do not want to quibble over language, but it is not us
saying you are forever shut off. If we did nothing, you could be shut
off, if we did not pass a piece of legislation here. What Florida is
doing now, plus those who want to do it, they would be shut off. I
guess I am just trying to see where is the nonaction--if we did no
action, nothing would happen, you would not have flow control.
Mr. GRAHAM. I am going to describe in a moment the dilemma that a
person like myself is in, because there clearly is an urgency to act
for those 15 to 20 communities which had formed an alliance using flow
control and committed themselves to these major environmentally and
public health protecting measures. But it wounds and offends me that in
the same action where we are protecting the past, we are unnecessarily
closing off the future for those communities which today, and certainly
in a few years, will be exactly like those that have taken advantage of
flow control in order to develop these more environmentally and public
health protecting measures.
Mr. CHAFEE. Well, the Senator has a good point. The other side of the
coin is that once you permit this, you are permitting communities to
set up and operate. That may be all well and good. But BFI, or Waste
Haulers, or whoever it is, cannot come in there and offer better,
cheaper service, and some citizen in that community is being deprived
of choice.
Mr. GRAHAM. You are taking the position that we here in Washington
have to be the ``big brother'' to protect 260 million Americans. I do
not think that the county commissioners of Broward County, FL, or the
city council of Providence, RI, are insensitive to the desires of their
citizens. They are the ones who wake up every morning in that
community. They are the ones who daily deal with these issues which
are, in many cases, difficult balancing questions. Yes, you could have
cheaper garbage rates in Broward County if everybody just hauled it to
the local hole in the ground and dumped it. But you would also be
putting your water supply at risk. And so the commissioners of that
community made a judgment that they were prepared to ask their citizens
to pay higher garbage fees in order to be able to dispose of their
solid waste in a more environmentally appropriate manner. Why should
they not be making that decision as opposed to our telling them it is a
decision that will be unavailable to them?
Mr. CHAFEE. I think this. First, I am not willing to concede that in
Broward or Dade County, or wherever it might be, inevitably, if do you
not have flow control, your waste is going to end up in an
environmentally damaging situation. That does not necessarily follow.
We have all kinds of laws on the books dealing with the handling of
waste in this country. And if some other outfit comes in--Waste
Management, or whoever it is--and hauls it, they cannot just take it
and dump it in some lovely field above a ground water area. They have
to dispose of it in a proper way.
But the whole root of what we are dealing with is the commerce clause
of the Constitution of the United States, which says that there should
be free interstate transportation and movement in our Nation. That has
served us pretty well. You might say, ``How petty can you get? Why
should Miami, or wherever, not be permitted to handle their waste, and
if everybody has to take it to one place, and that is the only place,
that is the way we want to run our business?'' But the Supreme Court
has said that is against the Constitution. I know we can fix it up, and
the Supreme Court, as you pointed out, has also said we can straighten
it out. So far, we have chosen not to take that extra step.
Mr. GRAHAM. So we are here, Mr. President, making an important
political judgment. We have the range of authority to deny totally flow
control authority to anybody, including those
[[Page S6446]] communities which have already utilized it and, in
reliance upon it, committed themselves to significant financial
obligations. That is an alternative that is available to us.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have the authority to grant a
very broad license to local governments and States to utilize flow
control.
What we have chosen to do--and I underscore the word ``chosen''--we
have selected among options what I will call a targeted grandfather
approach, in which we have said that for those who were in business as
of May 1994, and a rather tight definition of what you had to be doing
in May 1994, all of which is outlined on pages 56 through 58 of the
legislation, for a specific duration of time, you shall have authority
to use flow control. Everybody else you excluded.
Let me, if I could, complete some examples that would give some
context as to this theory of who should decide as to the range of local
authority. I mentioned earlier a case of Volusia County, Deland, and
the largest city, which is Daytona Beach, a fast-growing area in east
central Florida. The county currently does not have flow control. The
county was wise a number of years ago when it was able to purchase a
large piece of land at a low price and has been, in part because of
that, extremely successful in keeping its tipping fees--that is the
charges to use the landfill--at a low rate, the lowest in the State,
and still provide for an integrated solid waste management system.
At this point, they are not facing any particular competition and,
therefore, the county has not had a need for flow control. But the
director of solid waste in Volusia County is concerned about the
future. The director recognizes that he may not be able to effectively
address the public safety issues in our State--the threat of ground
water contamination--without the ability to control the waste stream,
should a private facility decide to open a facility in the area that
undercuts the counties' tipping fees.
In addition, the director of solid waste is concerned about the
ability of the county to float bonds in the future when it needs to
expand its current facilities. Flow control authority would enable the
county to have a stronger bond rating. Therefore, the absence of
prospective flow control is a serious concern to this rapidly expanding
county in Florida.
The dilemma that I mentioned to Senator Chafee that many of us feel
is that we recognize the sense of urgency to pass legislation that
reempowers those communities which had been using flow control and
which had relied upon it. We all agree that we must act quickly to
address the financial crisis that those communities are facing now.
Again, I use an example in Florida of Dade County. Dade County a
number of years ago, utilizing the State authority for flow control in
order to carry out its responsibilities for an integrated solid waste
system, set up a series of modern landfills and incinerators. Since the
Supreme Court action, which has undercut its ability to use flow
control to assure that there was a sufficient amount of solid waste
going to these facilities in order to generate enough revenue to pay
for the cost of operation, maintenance, and debt service on those
facilities, the county has been losing 45 percent of its waste, which
equates to $53 to $68 million a year in revenue. Moody's Investors
Service has recently downgraded Dade County's solid waste revenue bond
from an ``A'' to ``Baa1.'' Moody's specifically stated that the
significant diversion of waste to out-of-county facilities undermined
the current rate structure and that the lack of a long-term strategy
jeopardizes the system's continued ability to meet financial
obligations.
The county is also faced with an inability to plan for future
capacity and to ensure that recycling goals will be met in the future,
that is, future planning has been eliminated due to the severity of the
current fiscal crisis.
Half of the bulk waste recycling centers in Dade County have now been
closed. These centers used to accept old furniture, appliances, tires,
and other materials that could be recycled rather than placed in a
landfill.
Dade County had extensive school education programs encouraging young
people to become involved in appropriate activities for the disposal of
solid waste, especially directed at recycling. Those school programs
had to be eliminated because of the financial crisis.
Dade County had an active mulching program which has been
dramatically scaled back now to a bare minimum. This program in the
past provided mulching services to residents who brought yard waste and
tree branches, and the mulch was distributed to homeowners and farmers.
Now it goes directly to a landfill so that the county can come closer
to meeting its waste level requirements.
Elimination of innovative recycling programs has also been a
consequence of this financial crisis. Phone books, high-grade trash,
tires, and destruction and demolition debris which used to be recycled
are now headed for the landfill.
The clean organic waste composting programs are in jeopardy, due to
insufficient waste to implement the plan beyond a demonstration phase.
Those are some of the urgent consequences of the Supreme Court's
action for a community which had adopted flow control, and based upon
flow control, an integrated solid waste management program. They had
incurred very substantial, in the case of Dade County, over $100
million of indebtedness in order to pay for all those facilities.
It is because of communities such as that across America that there
is an urgency to pass legislation that will provide for reempowering of
those communities to utilize flow control and regain control of an
important segment of a traditional local government responsibility.
Mr. President, I am concerned that there is a bleak outlook for
communities in the future. There are many other communities which are
going to want to do what counties like Dade have already done. That is,
utilize flow control.
The ability of the local government to direct where its trash will be
stored, as unromantic a function as government could engage in, but an
important function which touches the lives of every citizen in the
community; to allow the people who are elected in that community to
make the judgment as to what is most appropriate to meet the variety of
needs in that community.
As I mentioned earlier, when my State came in the Union 150 years
ago, it was the smallest, the poorest, and the most remote State in the
Union, with a population of slightly more than 40,000. Today it has a
population of over 14 million. Twenty years from now, at current growth
rates, it will have a population nearing 20 million from its current 14
million.
Are we to assume there will not be a similar set of concerns about
protecting our ground water supplies, protecting public health 20 years
from now, as there was when these communities that today are engaging
in flow control adopted their plans? Clearly, the answer to that is no,
there will be a similar need for this type of local control of where
trash is disposed of in order to meet local environmental and public
health circumstances.
I believe strongly that these decisions should be made at the local
level by those elected officials who are closest to the situation. This
is not a conflict between government control and free market. In fact,
in my State, most of the actual work of solid waste management is done
by private firms.
As an example in Hillsborough County, the county seat of which is
Tampa, waste energy facility is operated by Ogden-Martin; landfill by
Waste Management; BFI operates a majority of the residential recycling
program. A wonderful example of a public-private partnership. In Lake
County in the center of the State, the waste energy facility is also
operated by Ogden-Martin, and the county has franchise agreements to
haul solid waste with three different private companies.
This is not an issue of the free market versus government control. It
is an example of local communities, through locally-elected
representatives, taking control of the responsibility for their
destiny, particularly protecting one of the most critical resources of
that community, its ground water.
[[Page S6447]] Mr. President, I believe that it is urgent that we
pass legislation on this subject. I would hope that before we complete
our deliberations that we would think seriously about the restraints
that we are imposing--I think, unnecessarily--that we would think about
the degree to which we are Federalizing what has been a traditional
local responsibility, the decision of where to dispose of garbage.
We are going to continue to be engaged as we have over the past
several weeks in some fundamental questions of what level of government
should decide important public issues and whether those decisions
should be made one time here in Washington or should be made 50, or
500, or 5,000 times at State and local levels.
Earlier today, we passed legislation that changed over two centuries
of American law relative to product liability. For two centuries that
responsibility was placed at the State level. States had the
responsibility to understand their own history, culture, politics,
economics, and they make a judgment as to how these matters of civil
justice should be resolved.
Colorado is a different State than Florida. South Carolina is a
different State than South Dakota. I believe in the proposition that
the citizens of those individual States should make judgments as to
what is appropriate for them today and in the future.
I strongly feel that that is also true of the issue of how to protect
natural resources, and how the disposition of solid waste affects the
protection of those resources. The situation is different from a
relatively arid State in the West than it is in a subtropical
environment in my State of Florida. The situation is different in the
State with the peaks of Colorado, from the State that is relatively
close to its water supply as we are with our high underground surface
water in Florida.
I believe that prudent policy for the future should be as it has been
in the past. That it is a responsibility of locally-elected officials
who are accountable to the people that elect them, to make a judgment
as to what is in the best interest. They would have the same range of
choices that we would have, but they would be making it based on their
understanding of the specific circumstances in their community.
I think that is intelligent federalism which we should apply to this
issue of solid waste disposal in the future, as we have in the past.
That it is not appropriate for Congress to make a decision here today
that two centuries of American tradition will be overturned, and now we
are going to federalize into a single decision here in Washington for
all of our States and all of our local communities one answer to the
question, of how they can dispose of their garbage.
Mr. President, I think the American people feel we have a lot of
important things to be dealing with here in Washington. Clearly, one of
those is going to be how to bring the Federal budget into balance.
I would suggest that that is a demanding enough responsibility for
Senators to make. We do not have much time left over to decide how
Quincy or Greeley will dispose of their garbage. We ought to let the
people in Greeley, CO, and Quincy, FL, decide how to dispose of their
garbage and put our attention to what the public expects Congress to
do--how are we going to balance our budget.
If we allocate responsibilities in that way, I think both the
citizens of Greeley, the citizens of Quincy, and the citizens of
America, would feel as if we were doing the jobs that they expected the
Senate to do, and how we were graded on how well we balanced the
budget, would hold Senators to account and how well the county and city
commissioners of Greeley and Quincy did their job would be the basis
upon which they would be held accountable by their vote.
Mr. President, in conclusion, I appreciate the fact that my friend
and colleague, the junior Senator from Rhode Island and the chairman of
the Environment and Public Works Committee, accepted the amendments
which I offered earlier. I hope that during this process we will give
serious attention to the question of, do we really want to federalize
the issue of disposal of local garbage? Or would we not be more prudent
to accept the invitation of the Supreme Court to allow this to continue
to be a responsibility of properly elected State and local officials?
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call.
Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be
permitted to speak as this morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________