[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 128 (Thursday, August 3, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S11322]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    REPORT ENTITLED ``EMPOWER- MENT: A NEW COVENANT WITH AMERICA'S 
            COMMUNITIES''--MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT--PM 72

  The Presiding Officer laid before the Senate the following message 
from the President of the United States, together with an accompanying 
report; which was referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and 
Urban Affairs.

To the Congress of the United States:
  I transmit herewith my Administration's National Urban Policy Report, 
``Empowerment: A New Covenant With America's Communities,'' as required 
by 42 U.S.C. 4503(a). The Report provides a framework for empowering 
America's disadvantaged citizens and poor communities to build a 
brighter future for themselves, for their families and neighbors, and 
for America. The Report is organized around four principles:
  First, it links families to work. It brings tax, education and 
training, housing, welfare, public safety, transportation, and capital 
access policies together to help families make the transition to self-
sufficiency and independence. This linkage is critical to the 
transformation of our communities.
  Second, it leverages private investment in our urban communities. It 
works with the market and the private sector to build upon the natural 
assets and competitive advantages of urban communities.
  Third, it is locally driven. The days of made in Washington 
solutions, dictated by a distant Government, are gone. Instead, 
solutions must be locally crafted, and implemented by entrepreneurial 
public entities, private sectors, and a growing network of community-
based firms and organizations.
  Fourth, it relies on traditional values--hard work, family, 
responsibility. The problems of so many inner-city neighborhoods--
family break-up, teen pregnancy, abandonment, crime, drug use--will be 
solved only if individuals, families, and communities determine to help 
themselves.
  These principles reflect an emerging consensus in the decades-long 
debate over urban policy. These principles are neither Democratic nor 
Republican: they are American. They will enable local communities, 
individuals and families, businesses, churches, community-based 
organizations, and civic groups to join together to seize the 
opportunities and to solve the problems in their own lives. They will 
put the private sector back to work for all families in all 
communities. I therefore invite the Congress to work with us on a 
bipartisan basis to implement an empowerment agenda for America's 
communities and families.
  In a sense, poor communities represent an untapped economic 
opportunity for our whole country. While we work together to open 
foreign markets abroad to American-made goods and services, we also 
need to work together to open the economic frontiers of poor 
communities here at home. By enabling people and communities in genuine 
need to take greater responsibility for working harder and smarter 
together, we can unleash the greatest underused source of growth and 
renewal in each of the local regions that make up our national economy 
and civic life. This will be good for cities and suburbs, towns and 
villages, and rural and urban America. This will be good for families. 
This will be good for the country.
  We have undertaken initiatives that seek to achieve these goals. Some 
seek to empower local communities to help themselves, including 
Empowerment Zones, Community Development banks, the Community 
Opportunity Fund, community policing, and enabling local schools and 
communities to best meet world-class standards. And some seek to 
empower individuals and families to help themselves, including our 
expansion of the earned-income tax cut for low- and moderate-income 
working families, and our proposals for injecting choice and 
competition into public and assisted housing and for a new G.I. Bill 
for America's Workers.
  I am determined to end Federal budget deficits, and my balanced 
budget proposal shows that we can balance the budget without abandoning 
the investments that are vital to the security and prosperity of the 
country, now and in the future. I am confident that, working together, 
we can build common ground on an empowerment agenda while putting our 
fiscal house in order. I will do everything in my power to make sure 
this happens.
                                                  William J. Clinton.  
  The White House, August 3, 1995.

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