[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 84 (Tuesday, June 17, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Page S5884]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                     STEVEN J. SHIMBERG'S DEPARTURE

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, this Friday, June 20, marks the 
last day Steven J. Shimberg will work here in the Senate as staff 
director and chief counsel of the Committee on Environment and Public 
Works. Next month, he will begin a new career with the National 
Wildlife Federation.
  Steve Shimberg is a New York native and a magna cum laude graduate of 
the State University of New York at Buffalo. Upon graduating from Duke 
University School of Law, Steve spent 3 years as a trial attorney with 
the U.S. Department of Justice's Land and Natural Resources Division 
before joining the staff of the Committee on Environment and Public 
Works in 1981.
  I have been a member of the Committee since I entered the Senate in 
1977. I served as the chairman or ranking minority member of the Water 
Resources Subcommittee from the 96th Congress through the 103d 
Congress, and I served as full committee chairman from September 1992 
through January 1993. So, over the years, I have seen Steve shepherd 
through the committee enormously complicated and thoroughly bipartisan 
legislation to protect our natural resources. I can attest to Steve's 
personableness, his sense of humor and good cheer, his comity, and his 
utter competence. Consummately professional, always courteous, and 
always calm.
  Environmental policy, to be supportable, must be based on sound 
science. And so I have argued that the committee needs more scientists 
and fewer lawyers on the staff. Steve certainly is an exception; he has 
been indispensable. While I applaud Federation officials for their 
astuteness in hiring Steve, I lament the loss his departure means to 
the committee, and to the Senate. We will miss him.
  Sir Christopher Wren's tombstone reads, ``Lector, si monumentum 
requiris circumspice.'' With regard to Steve's work over the past 17 
years on the committee, the products are around us all: cleaner air, 
cleaner water, a greatly redeemed physical and human 
environment.

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