[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 43 (Tuesday, March 26, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H2864-H2866]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       PROTECTING OUR ENVIRONMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Norwood] is recognized for 60 
minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman 
from Georgia [Mr. Norwood] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee 
of the majority leader.
  Mr. NORWOOD. Mr. Speaker, the Federal Government has a vital role to 
play in protecting our environment. If we are to preserve and build on 
the tremendous gains we have made in the last two decades in cleaning 
up our land, air, and water, we must have Federal guidelines enforced 
by an active and revitalized Environmental Protection Agency working in 
close cooperation with our States and local governments.
  Now that I have shattered your opinion of conservative Republican 
views on the environment, we can get down to nuts and bolts of how we 
accomplish the goals on which I think we all agree--for we are all 
environmentalists.
  Thirty years ago many of our rivers were horribly polluted, our air 
quality in parts of the country was so bad that people with even minor 
health problems were confined to their homes, and soil and building 
contamination was to an extent that our children showed elevated levels 
of lead poisoning in nationwide blood tests. These problems led 
Republican President Richard Nixon to create the Environmental 
Protection Agency to clean up the country.
  We have done a good job in getting started--but we still have a long 
way to go, and we can do better. That's what this new Congress should 
be about.
  In the three decades since the creation of our environmental laws, we 
have seen what began as strong measures to protect our natural 
resources turn into a tidal wave of regulations and lawsuits that 
stifle our economy, usurp local and State autonomy, and infringe on the 
constitutional rights of property owners, while accomplishing very 
little in the way of real protection or cleanup.
  This is generally what happens with every Federal agency or endeavor, 
given enough time. Because when we create laws and agencies to address 
a nationwide problem, we at the same time create a new industry 
comprised of Government bureaucrats; private sector consultants, 
experts, and contractors; specialized trial attorneys; and consumer 
activist groups.
  All these groups have a powerful vested interest in seeing that the 
original nationwide problem is not only not solved, but continues to be 
an ever-growing problem, expanding their industry, careers, and incomes 
into perpetuity.
  With groups like Ralph Nader's Citizen Action, the Energy Research 
Foundation, Greenpeace, and the like, we have created a cottage 
industry raising millions of dollars a year, that would be put out of 
business if we ever really solved our environmental problems.
  The trial attorneys that have become emeshed in our cleanup efforts 
are costing us $900 million a year--money that could be used on 
actually cleaning up waste sites, but is instead siphoned away without 
a single shovelful of waste being touched in return.
  The principles behind environmental legislation are good--the problem 
is how they are enforced and carried out. But to even suggest reform or 
change in the status quo is to invite the wrath of these special 
interests, and that is where we find ourselves today in searching for 
better ways to clean up our environment.
  There is probably no better example of this than the ongoing effort 
to reform the Superfund Clean-Up Program. This program came into 
existence in 1980 with the noble goal of identifying and cleaning up 
the worse cases of site pollution and contamination in the country, 
called National Priorities List Sites, or NPL's. In addition, secondary 
pollution sites were identified as ``brownfield sites'' that also badly

[[Page H2865]]

needed cleaning up, but were not as critical to overall public health 
as the NPL sites.
  A small amount of the funds to accomplish this mammoth task come from 
the taxpayer, and most comes from a special tax on industries and 
products that tend to create pollution. We take in around $1.5 billion 
a year from this combination of taxes on oil and chemicals, and the 
overall corporate environmental tax. In addition, individual companies 
that played an original role in creating one of these NPL sites pay as 
large a portion of the total clean-up costs as can be extracted. There 
are 1,300 NPL sites in the country, and another 450,000 brownfield 
sites.
  How are we doing in achieving this mission? Ninety-one sites have 
been cleaned up in the 16 years the Superfund has been in existence; 91 
out of 1,300.
  The average cleanup has taken 12 to 15 years to complete, and cost 
more than $30 million a site.
  Of those 12 to 15 years spent on each site, 10 years are spent in the 
courts, in negotiations, and on bureaucratic studies and redtape. It 
takes only 2 years to actually get the job done.
  Of the $30 million spent on each site, half of the money goes to 
trial lawyers and Federal bureaucrats. Of the $25 billion spent since 
1980, that's nearly $12 billion going to trial attorneys, salaries at 
the EPA, and studies on how to clean up instead of just getting the job 
done--for that we were only left around $13 billion.
  So while we spend our Superfund money and time on courts, 
bureaucrats, studies, and lawyers, 10 million children under the age of 
12 continue to live within 4 miles of a waste site--breathing the air, 
and drinking the water. At today's pace, these children will be in 
their midtwenties before the sites are cleaned.
  That's why we introduced the Reform of Superfund Act, or H.R. 2500 
this past year to reform the way we clean up these sites. So far, we 
have held 17 congressional hearings, heard testimony from 159 witnesses 
on ways to improve and speed up the process, and have conducted over 50 
bipartisan meetings on the effort.
  In return for these efforts, we are attacked by the special interests 
whose cash-flow would be cut if we succeed. The Ralph Nader faction 
under the guise of Citizen Action has mounted an all-out campaign to 
stop the efforts. Why? One of their main backers is the Trial Lawyers 
Association, which would stand to lose millions if the Superfund were 
used to clean up pollution instead of paying lawyers.
  There is no better example of this than in my own district. The area 
surrounding the now-closed Southern Wood Piedmont Plant in Augusta has 
been under study and court action for years now. Yet the Hyde Park 
neighborhood most affected by the arsenic contamination remains just as 
it was before the efforts began. The children in the neighborhood 
continue to play on their public school playgrounds next to arsenic-
contaminated drainage ditches. But the court costs have run in the 
millions in the on-going litigation, and EPA experts and consultants 
have justified their salaried positions at taxpayer expense by the 
dozens of studies undertaken as the project drags on, year after year. 
We don't need to talk about it any longer, we need to clean it up.
  Our need to revitalize our efforts to protect the environment are 
certainly not limited to just Superfund. Should Washington bureaucrats 
be allowed to tell you the same water treatment regulations that apply 
to Anchorage, AK, should also apply to Augusta, GA? What works most 
effectively to return clean water to our waterways in one geographic 
location may not be as effective from an environmental or cost 
standpoint in another, yet we continue with the Federal concept of one 
size fits all, to the detriment of our environment.
  Do we follow the latest special-interest fad to pass new restrictions 
on chlorine levels in municipal water supplies based on suspect 
findings by EPA researchers? This is exactly the direction we are 
heading, and that is not good science.
  We cannot base massive expenditures of Federal money based on a 
researcher's ``best guess'' about a possibility of a risk--we have too 
many real environmental threats that we have put off dealing with for 
years. And if we do allow environmental scare tactics push us into 
``bad science'' decisions on chlorine reductions, we greatly increase 
the risk of fecal coliform bacterial infections in both humans and 
wildlife as a result. That is a known factor, and a guaranteed result.
  There are a pair of bald eagles that nest on an island in the 
Savannah River across from my house. I love those eagles, am very 
personally protective of them, and feel that our laws need to do the 
same.
  But what about the cotton farmer that has a pair of nesting eagles on 
his farm? The farmer has lived on his land all his life. He feeds his 
family by growing cotton. But then the bureaucrats tell him that he can 
keep his land, but he can't grow cotton because the pesticides to keep 
away the boll weevil may interfere with the eagles' nesting.
  That farmer knows his land. He knows about the nesting eagles. His 
neighbor that grows cotton was just put out of business because he too 
had nesting eagles. The farmer kills the eagles so the bureaucrats 
can't stop him from growing cotton and feeding his family. He buries 
the eagles, no one ever knows, and we all lose a valuable and 
irreplaceable natural resource. Shouldn't we have regulations that 
protect the eagles and the homo sapiens--the man and his family?
  We all want environmental policy where Americans will be healthier, 
safer, and cleaner. We all want to protect our natural resources and 
wildlife. But we must start doing it better, with an eye on concrete 
results.
  That means cleaning up every one of the Superfund sites in the 
country, saving as much money as we can based on good science.
  The regulators must be accountable and responsible for their actions. 
The regulations must be changed to embrace State and local control, and 
take into effect not just the letter of the law, but the intent.
  My friend Sam Booher in Augusta, one of the most knowledgeable and 
dedicated environmentalists in the country, knows far more about what 
is needed to protect our natural resources in East Central Georgia than 
any bureaucrat in Washington, and we need to start letting people like 
Sam have a larger voice in this fight.
  What we attempt to do by cutting funding for the EPA is get the 
Washington bureaucrats' attention. We want fewer Federal agents that, 
in the words of Thomas Jefferson, ``swarm across our land to eat our 
sustenance.'' We want our tax dollars used to cleanup our environment, 
not pay the 1,000 lawyers that work for the EPA, not pay the 
bureaucrats to do one redundant study after another. We want our 
environment cleaned up now.
  And what do we get for trying to add common sense to our 
environmental laws, for trying to use our fewer and fewer Federal 
dollars more wisely? We are attacked by the President and his liberal 
allies in Congress for their political gain. We are attacked by the 
trial lawyers for their monetary gain. We are attacked by the 
bureaucrats to save their jobs. And we are attacked by Ralph Nader for 
if we succeed he loses most of his funding.
  We need to increase our Federal efforts to preserve and protect our 
environment, but it must be done more wisely and effectively. Our enemy 
is not industry, farmers, the EPA, or even regulations themselves--it 
is the Washington bureaucracy that continues to expand from our efforts 
to save our natural resources, while our children continue to live with 
pollution, and real protection takes a back seat to funding special 
interests.

                              {time}  1630

  Mr. Speaker, I have never run for political office before, and I am a 
freshman and new to this field. As most people who are willing to come 
to Washington and serve, each of us have priorities. I was very 
interested and am interested and will stay interested in us balancing 
our budget. It is not hard to understand why. I would like for my 
children and my grandchildren to live the American dream, and move into 
the 21st century, have a decent job, and be able to keep enough of 
their own income so they can be responsible for themselves, and so they 
can live in an America that is better than my America when I grew up. 
That is our responsibility. I am very interested in that.

[[Page H2866]]

  I want to make sure my children and grandchildren do not have to go 
to war. There is only one way to keep that from happening, and that is 
to have a very, very strong defense. That is our best bet to keep our 
children out of war.
  Following that, it only makes sense, one could only conclude that if 
you are interested in the 21st century for your children economically, 
so they can have a good job, have a good standard of living, you could 
not possibly not be interested in them having clean water. You could 
not possibly not be interested in them having clean air. What good will 
it do for them to have a good job and pay only reasonable taxes if they 
cannot drink their water or breathe their air?
  Mr. Speaker, I know that there is a lot that has been said about this 
Republican Congress in terms of the environment, but I believe that if 
we can get past those who wish to reach political gain, those who wish 
to make money out of this argument, we can in this Congress pass 
environmental laws that will clean up this country and keep it cleaned 
up, as opposed to continuing to sink millions and millions and millions 
of dollars into bureaucratic redtape and into the pockets of our trial 
lawyers.
  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate having the opportunity this afternoon to 
get this off my chest.

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