[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 116 (Tuesday, July 18, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10227-S10229]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     URBAN REGULATORY RELIEF ZONES

  Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, one of the main challenges, which we 
face as a society, that relates to the regulatory climate in America is 
the condition of our urban centers.
  Today, many of our cities have become hopeless arenas of decay and 
despair. They are places where industry used to flourish, places where 
productivity used to take place. But the fact is that the number of 
enterprises in cities is plummeting. Just in the last 20 years, you can 
note that the number of businesses which inhabit our urban centers has 
gone down dramatically.
  St. Louis, MO, has had a 32-percent decline in the number of 
businesses, from 3,497 businesses in 1972 to 2,386 businesses in 1992. 
Detroit, MI, for example, went from 6,945 businesses in 1972 to 3,448 
businesses in 1992--a 50-percent decrease. So we see that one of our 
problems is that not only have cities become a difficult place for 
individuals, they have become a difficult place for businesses and 
industry.
  As a matter of fact, it is important for us to understand, Mr. 
President, that this is a problem which is related to the notion that 
people who do not have jobs are at peril. The entirety of our 
regulatory framework is designed to deal with the well-being of 
individuals, to promote their health, their safety, and, hopefully, to 
extend their longevity, so that people live longer, so that they have 
an opportunity for a quality existence.
  But the truth of the matter is at the very core of our urban 
societies. We have the biggest challenges that relate to health. We 
have the biggest challenges that relate to longevity, and the biggest 
challenges that relate to personal security.
  America's urban areas suffer a murder every 22 minutes, a robbery 
every 49 seconds, an aggravated assault every 30 seconds. In a survey 
of the parents of first- and second-graders in Washington, DC, 31 
percent of those said that they worried a lot about their children 
being involved in violence; almost 40 percent of the low-income urban 
parents worried about their children being shot. That is a quality of 
life issue. Thirty-one percent of the first and second graders in 
Washington, DC, reported witnessing shootings. One out of every three 
children had witnessed a shooting, and 39 percent said they had seen 
dead bodies. These are first and second graders.
  We have a major challenge that relates to the security, the safety, 
and the health and well-being of our citizens in our urban centers. One 
out of every 24 black males in America will have his life ended by 
homicide. Our urban centers are so hopeless and filled with despair, 
and opportunity is so absent, that we find that the challenge is the 
challenge to stay alive. There is a death sentence for 1 out of every 
24 black males.
  The New England Journal of Medicine stated that a young black man 
living in Harlem is less likely to live to the age of 40 than a young 
man living in Bangladesh, which is perhaps the poorest of all of the 
nations on the face of the Earth. These things are startling. These 
things bother us. The pathologies of urban America are very 
challenging.
  What is really stunning is the fact that the absence of work 
opportunity at the very heart of America's cities has been a big part 
of this condition. Youngsters in our urban settings are known to drop 
out at much higher rates than in other settings. Why? Some say it is 
because those youngsters in our schools do not see work opportunities, 
they do not see the promise or hope of doing something worthwhile with 
their lives upon graduation. Why persist in school if there will be 
nothing for you to do when you graduate? It is in that setting that we 
need to take a careful look at the way in which regulation has had an 
impact on what happens in our urban settings.
  I became sensitized to this, Mr. President, when I was spending a lot 
of time with the people last year. I would work in a variety of 
settings in my campaign for the U.S. Senate. Across the State of 
Missouri, both in Kansas City and St. Louis, I encountered businesses 
that wanted to expand but could not. They wanted to grow and they 
wanted to offer more employment and they wanted to build the arena of 
opportunities. But they could not do it because of regulations--
regulations that throttled them.
  Just yesterday, I spoke about Anpaul Windows, a company whose 
employees--over half of them--were minorities. They were doing very 
well and the company needed to expand, but they had to leave the 
oppressive regulatory environment of the urban center for the green 
fields of suburbia because there were no contaminants in the green 
fields of suburbia. You could build a new factory there, and everything 
was in accordance with the way the factories were supposed to be, and 
you did not have to worry about the historic old buildings, or the 
prohibition about whether or not you could make a 8-foot door or a 10-
foot door because of the historic designation of the factory.
  What happened was the Anpaul Window Co. left the city of St. Louis, 
which left the city that much emptier. They are doing well. It is in 
Washington, MO, not Washington, DC. But it is 50 or 60 miles away from 
the people who need the jobs the most. They went to a new green field, 
but they did so because the regulatory framework really militates 
against jobs, industry, and development in the heart of our cities. All 
of those old factories and all of those old plants do not comply with 
all the new regulations. Lots of times, there is just a little 
narrowness in the door, or maybe a taint of some substance in the 
flooring. And the EPA comes in and says, well, grind over the floor and 
see if you can get the taint out, and if it does not come off, there 
may not be something that can be done to change it.
  So what we have effectively done with our regulatory framework has 
been to impose the tremendous cost upon the citizens of our cities. It 
is a cost that not only they have to pay--higher costs for goods 
because our things are manufactured in plants that comply with 
regulations--it is an opportunity cost, because the city centers do not 
have the opportunities for employment. They do not have the 
opportunities for industrial development. Those individuals do not 
share in the opportunities of our culture. They are not worried so much 
about the lead poisoning from paint, they are worried about the lead 
poisoning from a .38. These are real challenges that we ought to face.
  Let me tell you about the printing concern in Kansas City. The 
president has a publishing business which has grown over the past few 
years; it now employs 85 people. While business is doing well, the 
president wants to expand the business, but there is a problem. He 
could expand into more parts of the building in the downtown area, 

[[Page S 10228]]
in the urban center. He wanted to move into different parts of the 
building, but regulations prevent such expansion. The printing company 
has no environmental problems. But the landlord of the building where 
the business is located has had a problem with trace elements of PCB's 
in the floor material in parts of the building. Tests have shown there 
are no elements of PCB's in the air. They are somehow in the material 
of the floor of the building.
  Now, the president would probably like to expand to these other 
floors of the building if he could be assured that there would be no 
liability. As it now stands, the EPA may condemn the whole building 
altogether. It would cost the company about $500,000 to move and to 
take all these jobs out of the city. And it looks like that is what 
they are going to have to do. The landlord has spent over $250,000 so 
far in legal fees, and another $100,000 trying to grind down the floors 
to see if he could get through all the PCB's. I suppose he probably 
released more PCB's into the atmosphere than could have ever happened 
otherwise.
  The EPA, in other parts of the country, has allowed for a covering of 
the floor to take care of situations like this. But the EPA cannot seem 
to make a decision in this Kansas City concern. Here we stand to lose 
85 downtown urban center jobs--the price of regulation--saying we 
cannot allow you to expand in this building for technical reasons that 
are not uniformly applied across the country.
  I repeat, there have been situations where these kinds of things have 
been taken care of. But as it now stands, EPA's inaction has again 
stalled the economic progress and job growth where it was most sorely 
needed. If this situation is not resolved, ultimately the printing 
company will have to move out of the city altogether. I just want to 
say that these are real people. These are real situations.
  We have children dying in drive-by shootings, we have individuals who 
cannot get jobs, we have despair, bad health, we have the lack of 
security, the lack of safety that comes with a hollow core of the inner 
cities of America, in part because we have had a regulatory red line 
around the inner cities, which have basically said you cannot develop 
in here because this stuff is old. These buildings were used in 
previous settings where we did not have the environmental requirements 
that we have now, and because they were used in those previous 
settings, they are full of liabilities for business. They are full of 
liabilities for industry. They are full of liabilities for producers.
  As a result, if you want to be an industry, you want to be in 
business, you want to be a producer, you cannot be here, but have to go 
to suburbia, in the green fields, and we find ourselves hollowing out 
our cities. We find young people in despair turning to all kinds of 
things.
  Under the guise of regulations that would abate noise, for instance, 
we get the noise of crack cocaine. We hear the slam of the slammer 
door. We hear the shot of the pistol. We hear the wail of the family in 
the wake of the ambulance that carries away the individual who has been 
wounded or killed.
  It is time to recognize that this economics redlining of the inner 
city that results from hyperregulation is costing us our ability to 
deliver jobs.
  Make no mistake about it, make no mistake about it, we all want to 
have a healthier environment. But you cannot tell somebody who has a 1 
in 25 chance of being shot as an unemployed person on the street in one 
of the urban cores, you cannot tell someone that you are keeping the 
jobs out of there because there is a 1 in 1 million chance they might 
have some respiratory problem as a result of some kind of atmospheric 
nonattainment.
  We have to weigh the real impacts of what we are seeing happen here. 
The real impact of regulations in many urban centers is a redlining 
against developments, a redlining against industry. It is a redlining 
against opportunity.
  When we take development opportunities and industry out of the 
communities, we have joblessness, lawlessness, hopelessness. Those are 
conditions that are far greater threats to the safety, security and 
general well-being of the population than many of the things we have 
sought to regulate.
  What is the answer? How can we address this problem? What is it that 
we ought to do? I am suggesting in the Urban Regulatory Relief Zone Act 
that we should allow mayors of urban areas to convene economic 
development commissions that could make application for the waiver of 
specific Federal regulations when those regulations preclude jobs and 
development, when they preclude opportunities, when they result in the 
hopelessness, despair, and danger in the inner city, when they really 
result in a lower standard of longevity, a lower standard of health, a 
lower standard of safety, a lower standard of security.
  When the impact of regulation has an inverse consequence--instead of 
promoting health, security and safety, it results in the absence of 
jobs and opportunities in the core of our inner cities and destroys the 
potential for health, security and safety--the economic development 
commissions of these areas ought simply to be able to make application 
to the Federal agencies and say to those Federal agencies, we ask for a 
waiver, because the imposition of the requirement in our community has 
the anomalous effect, has the opposite effect, of what it should have. 
It is causing our children to be shot. It is causing our children to 
drop out of school when they see no opportunity. We need to waive some 
of these regulations when the waiver would, in fact, elevate the 
health, the safety, and the employment opportunities, when the waiver 
would help people live longer and more productive lives than the 
imposition.
  So the Urban Regulatory Relief Zone Act which I have proposed would 
simply be a way of saying it is time to make good on what our intention 
is. If our intention in regulation is to improve the health, safety, 
security, and general well-being of individuals in our urban centers 
where the impact of regulation has frequently been the opposite, we 
need to say ``Let's give those urban centers the chance, through 
economic development commissions, to make application to have those 
regulatory provisions waived.''
  I think we all understand that we do not want to have the potential 
for the waiver of regulatory protections just willy-nilly. If 
regulations are decent or good or important, we do not want to waive 
them lightly.
  I think it is important to note if you had those kind of economic 
development commissions that the law provides for, and you have the 
kind of public notice that the law provides for, that the people who 
represent the affected population would only submit such applications 
for waiver when they were convinced that as a result of the waiver 
there would be an elevation of the life expectancy, an elevation of the 
health and safety, an elevation of the security, the quality of life of 
the individuals.
  Finally, this application, which under the proposed enactment would 
go to the Office of Management and Budget and then be referred to the 
various agencies, would be finally acted on by the agency. If the 
agency concluded, in spite of the application, that there was a 
substantial danger to the health and safety of the occupants, it could 
persist in denying relief. It could say no to the waiver. It would give 
authority for the EPA or other areas of regulation to say, ``The impact 
of our regulation in that community is hurting people, not helping. The 
impact of our regulation is shortening people's lives. It is decreasing 
their health, not expanding their health. It is causing hopelessness 
and despair. It is causing young people to drop out of school because 
they see no opportunity.'' Yes, we ought to, in this circumstance, 
waive these technical requirements and, as a result, bring real benefit 
to the citizens of that particular area.
  I believe this is a real opportunity. We have discriminated 
dramatically against urban residents with regulation. Regulations, 
invariably, are designed to make things that were done in the past 
illegal, to make things that happened in a previous way of doing 
business inappropriate.
  We regulate to say you cannot do things that way anymore. There are 
some good reasons for that. But the institutions that worked on these 
things in the past are in the midst of our great cities. We have 
basically said you cannot work there anymore. We are reaping the 
harvest. We are reaping the 

[[Page S 10229]]
harvest because 40 percent of all adult men in our distressed inner 
cities did not work in a year that was studied recently, while a 
significant number worked only sporadically or part time.
  Today, half of all the residents of the distressed neighborhoods in 
our big cities live below the federally defined poverty threshold. In 
1993, that was $14,763 for a family of four. The reason for that is, in 
part, we have said to businesses, we have a regulatory framework that 
really provides incentives for you to get out of here, for you to go to 
that green field in suburbia, go to a new place, leave the city alone.
  We provided incentives. We have not done it purposely. We have not 
done it knowingly. But we have provided real incentives for people to 
leave the urban centers of America.
 And, when we leave them empty we leave the people there empty. We 
leave them in peril. We leave them in distress. We leave them in 
despair. And ultimately we leave some of them in a situation from which 
they can never escape.

  There are those who say, ``Well, you don't want to have a standard 
for safety or an environment that is lower in the city than it is in 
some other area. There has to be environmental justice.'' I believe in 
environmental justice. I believe everyone should have an equal chance 
at the good life that we want to enjoy. But I believe that when our 
requirements are shortening the lives of individuals instead of 
extending them, when our requirements are pulling the rug out from 
under the health of our population, we ought to think carefully about 
whether or not they are having the right effect.
  I do not have the studies in my hand right now, but I think virtually 
all of us in this Chamber understand that when we have looked at health 
statistics people who are employed tend to be healthier than people who 
are unemployed, and people who are employed tend to be safer than 
people who are unemployed. There is very little that is more dangerous 
in an employment setting in this country than there is to be standing 
unemployed on the street corners of some of our urban centers.
  I believe we ought to look hard at the way in which regulation has 
drawn a red line around the core of America's cities, the way 
regulation has basically said, ``Do not invest here. Do not produce 
here. Do not do business here. You cannot get a job here.'' I think we 
ought to say to ourselves, let us allow these cities to make an 
evaluation. When they come to a conclusion that the general well-being 
of the people--when they come to the conclusion that the health and 
safety of the inner-city residents--would be benefited by a waiver, let 
us let them apply. And let us give the agency the authority to grant 
that waiver application, so we can bring jobs and opportunity and hope 
back to the center of our cities.
  I believe one of the next items which we will be moving toward in the 
debate here in the U.S. Senate will be an item which is referred to as 
welfare reform. We desperately need welfare reform. But, frankly, as 
much as we need welfare reform we need opportunity for individuals, 
because we are going to ask people to go to work and we are going to 
expect them to go to work. But how can we ask people in our inner 
cities to go to work, how can we expect them to go to work, if we 
continue to develop a regulatory framework which redlines the inner 
city and says there cannot be jobs here, there cannot be opportunity 
here?
  Mr. President, I believe it is time for us to grant relief to the 
urban centers, to give them a level playing field, to give them a 
chance to attract business and industry that is consistent with the 
health and safety, the longevity, and the security of the residents of 
that area. Our regulatory framework has not served them well.
  They have paid the higher prices that we have all talked about in the 
last few weeks, talking about regulation here in this Chamber. But they 
have also paid a tremendously higher price than just the increased cost 
of goods that come from regulation. They have paid the price of 
joblessness and they have paid the price of hopelessness. They have 
paid the price of looking into the eyes of their young people who have 
no ambition because they cannot see an opportunity in their 
neighborhood. That is a substantially greater price than the $600 
billion a year that it is estimated that regulation costs us in 
America. Oh, yes, they have paid their share of the $600 billion. But 
the opportunity costs--in the very heart of American urban centers has 
been a tremendous opportunity cost, and it is one which we can ill-
afford to ignore.
  So I rise this evening in the midst of the debate on regulatory 
reform to say we must recognize the unique circumstances of American 
cities. We must give these neighborhoods at the core of America, the 
mature cities of America, the opportunity to have relief when, as a 
matter of fact, the imposition of regulations now achieves a purpose 
absolutely contrary to the purpose for which the law was enacted which 
provided for regulations. It shortens lives, impairs safety, ruins 
health, and destroys opportunity.
  It is time for the Urban Regulatory Relief Zone Act, and I hope we 
have an opportunity to include that in our dealings with regulatory 
relief during our deliberations this week.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ashcroft). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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