[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 125 (Monday, July 31, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H8061-H8062]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


               THE FAILURE TO ENFORCE ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Pallone] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to talk tonight briefly about what 
happened with regard to the VA, HUD, and EPA appropriations bill, and 
specifically the amendment sponsored by the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. 
Stokes] and the gentleman from New York [Mr. Boehlert] on a bipartisan 
basis which was in effect turned around tonight.
  Mr. Speaker, I think many people do not realize in the House of 
Representatives you can vote once in what we call the Committee of the 
Whole, which is what happened with this bill last week, and have a vote 
one way, but again, when the bill comes to the full House, as it did 
tonight, you can have the same amendment or provision, and the bill can 
go another way, and what happened essentially, Mr. Speaker, is that 
over the weekend the Republican leadership spent a lot of time trying 
to convince Members and get Members back here so that in fact today, 
when this amendment came up again, the vote went the other way, and 
what I consider a very good amendment that was sponsored on a 
bipartisan basis by both Democrats and Republicans was defeated. The 
appropriations bill that we took up today essentially does great damage 
to the environment by including something like 17 riders, as we call 
them, that would prohibit expenditures of funds for enforcement of 
environmental protection.
  Mr. Speaker, when I was first elected to the House of Representatives 
back in 1988, I believe the main reason I was elected was because I 
said I would come down here and try to protect the oceans and try and 
protect the environment. We had gone through a summer in New Jersey 
where we had medical waste wash up on the beaches. Our beaches were 
closed. People were very concerned about what the Federal Government 
was doing to protect the environment, particularly clean water, and we 
passed some major legislation over the last 7 or 8 years that increases 
protection of the environment not only with clean water, but clean air 
and a lot of other areas, and the most important aspect of that is 
enforcement because, if you think about it, you can pass all the 
environmental bills you want, you can have every environmental agency 
that you can possibly have, but if you do not have the money to hire 
people to go out and enforce the law, you might
 as well not have the laws on the books, and that is what we were 
facing here today, a bill, an appropriations bill, that cut back by 
one-third the amount of money that was available to the Environmental 
Protection Agency to enforce the law and riders, if you can call them, 
or provisions that were put into this appropriations bill that made it 
difficult, if not impossible, for the EPA to enforce environmental 
laws.

  The amendment sponsored by the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Stokes] and 
the gentleman from New York [Mr. Boehlert] would have changed all that 
and taken out these riders, and, as I said, it did pass last week, but 
over the weekend a lot of pressure was put on this Congress, 
particularly the Republican Members, to try to make sure that that 
bill, that amendment failed today, and it did in fact fail today.

                              {time}  2215

  To give you an idea of some of the provisions that are in this bill 
now, without that amendment having passed, the spending package 
includes more than 17 substantive riders which will gut key 
environmental provisions by prohibiting spending for implementation and 
enforcement.
  Mr. Speaker, let us talk about the Clean Water Act, which is so 
important to my district and to coastal states. Basically, the bill 
would bring enforcement of the existing law to a halt. It stops 
enforcement of wetlands protection programs. It blocks the Great Lakes 
water quality initiative. It bars effluent guidelines and water quality 


[[Page H 8062]]
standards. It freezes storm water permits and it also stops enforcement 
of sewer overflow permits. If you think of those things collectively, 
they add up to gutting the Clean Water Act.
  With regard to the Clean Air Act, it makes the clean air operating 
permit program voluntary. It exempts refineries from air toxic 
standards. It allows full credit for ineffective auto emission 
inspection and maintenance programs. It exempts the oil and gas 
industry from accident prevention
 programs. It provides special treatment for cement kilns and exempts 
those kilns that burn hazardous waste from air toxic regulation, and it 
forbids trip reduction strategies in state clean air plans.

  Mr. Speaker, some of these things I am providing are from an analysis 
put together by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
  On the Safe Drinking Water Act, which is so important to so many 
communities in this country, the bill prohibits, on EPA's issuance of 
tap water standards for arsenic, a known human carcinogen, it prohibits 
the EPA's issuance of a tap water standard for radon and other 
radionuclides. Other environmental protection programs are gutted. 
There is a threat, essentially, to the community right to know program. 
It is gutted. There are major cuts in the energy efficiency program. It 
also revokes the Delaney clause.
  Mr. Speaker, the bill essentially repeals the Federal Food, Drug and 
Cosmetic Act's prohibition on the use of cancer causing pesticides in 
foods when the pesticides concentrate in processed foods, such as in 
the making of apple sauce. All in all, this is a very bad piece of 
legislation. It is really a shame tonight that we saw the reversal on 
the Stokes-Boehlert amendment.


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