    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [February 19, 1998]
    [Pages 246-249]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks Announcing the New Clean Water Initiative in Baltimore
    February 19, 1998

        Thank you very much, Thank you. I don't know about you, but I
    thought that Larry Simns did a terrific job. Can
    we give him a hand? [Applause] I've been in public life long enough to
    know when a guy throws a sucker punch. When he got up there and said,
    ``Oh, I'm just

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    this lowly president of''--[laughter]--I thought this guy is fixing to
    give us a heck of a good talk. [Laughter] And sure enough, he did.
        I thank you for providing as much as anything else, Larry, a historic perspective, going back through generations
    of your family's life, and also reminding us that we all have a stake in
    clean water one way or another, and all of us who depend upon you and
    the people like you to provide us with good, clean, safe seafood have
    sometimes a bigger connection than even we're aware of.
        Thank you, Mr. Vice President, for your
    leadership and your inspiration to me over these last 5 years. Thank
    you, Secretary Glickman and Administrator
    Browner. I thank Senator
    Sarbanes, a truly remarkable person, for
    all the many wonderful things he has done for Maryland and with our
    administration. I thank Senator Mikulski, who doubles the energy of any room she is in. [Laughter]
    Barbara couldn't see me, but I was rolling my eyes when she said, well,
    she never dreamed she could get the President to come, and maybe it just
    happened to be--if you believe that--[laughter]. When she makes up her
    mind to do something--you're just like my dog, Buddy, grabbing a bone.
    [Laughter] I mean, you might as well go and say yes, because sooner or
    later you're going to do whatever it is she's decided that you're going
    to do. [Laughter] So I'm honored to be here.
        Congressman Cummings, thank you for
    your friendship and your leadership. Thank you, Governor. I was especially impressed by how you handled this
    recent pfiesteria outbreak and by what you said about it. And I thank
    you for all you've done. And, thank you, Lieutenant Governor
    Townsend. And, Mr. Mayor,
    thanks for your long friendship and your
    leadership here in Baltimore. I want to thank the Secretary of
    State and the city council members and all
    the others who are here. But especially I want to thank James Bond and his vice president, Mr. Rockefeller--[laughter]--and the AmeriCorps people
    and all the others.
        The Vice President and I had a
    wonderful time before we got out here. I know we were late, but we were
    having a good time. We saw these young people working in a woodworking
    shop. They made us two beautiful, beautiful rocking chairs. And I love
    rocking chairs. I got all kinds of different rocking chairs I've
    collected over the last 30-odd years, maybe more now. And I'll have
    theirs up at Camp David this weekend if I can possibly get there. If
    not, I'll have it at the White House. Anyway, I'm going to do my best to
    spend the weekend in this rocking chair that I was given today.
    [Laughter]
        And we saw young people testing the water, young people rebuilding
    the shoreline. We saw a lot of work being done in the classrooms and on
    the computers following the ship around Cape Horn in South America
    today. And we saw them playing that computer game, ``Who Killed Rocky
    Rockfish?,'' which two of your teachers have developed, which was
    utterly fascinating to me. I never did find out who did it--[laughter]--
    but the students promised to let me know when they do.
        This whole day has been a wonderful way of illustrating the point I
    want to make to America, which is that our concern about the
    environment--our concern for clean water in particular, but
    environmental matters in general--needs to be folded into the fabric of
    our daily life. It needs to be a part of how all of our children learn,
    how they learn science, how they learn about computers. It needs to be a
    part of how we think about the economy, as the Vice President said. And
    especially, we need to focus, for the next few years, on this whole
    issue of water quality.
        Now, I grew up in a landlocked State, so I didn't get to see a lot
    of bays when I was a boy. But I grew up in a town surrounded by three
    lakes. And when I was a child, some of the happiest days of my life were
    spent in the remote regions of the Arkansas Ozarks on the Buffalo
    National River, which was the very first river Congress set aside, over
    20 years ago, under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. And the character of
    our relationship to the water is one of the unique things about America
    that you can find going all the way back to the beginning and that you
    can see in the present day. I don't know what the numbers are, but
    there's this absolutely breathtaking percentage of the American people
    when they go on vacation every year, go looking for some kind of water.
        And the Governor was telling me on
    the way over here how when this project got started, the Living
    Classroom got started, one of the most troubling things to him was to
    see that some of the children in Baltimore had never even been to the
    bay and how they started--you know, you all say, taking the kids to the

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    bay--so everybody could see these things. I think that is terribly
    important.
        Some of you know that not very long ago I went home to Arkansas to
    bury my 91-year-old uncle, a man after who I named my beloved little
    dog--and I did that because he was an avid outdoorsman. When I ran for
    Governor of Arkansas, 20 years ago this year, I called my uncle, who had
    about a sixth grade education and about a 160 IQ, and I said, ``What do
    you think I ought to campaign on?'' He said, ``Heck, I don't care.'' He
    said, ``All I want you to do is keep the rivers clean enough for me to
    fish in and for the kids to swim in.'' He said, ``You fix that, and the
    rest of it will be all right.''
        There are an awful lot of people in this country who still feel that
    way. You heard what Larry said in his introduction--for 25 years we have
    made great progress in cleaning our waters. Largely this progress has
    come by controlling pollution from point sources, from factories and
    sewage plants. Yet, 40 percent of our Nation's waters are still too
    polluted for fishing and swimming--25 years after the Clean Water Act.
    That is unacceptable.
        That's what I was talking about in the State of the Union Address;
    that's what I'm here to talk about today in some greater detail. We must
    address the largest remaining challenge to cleaning our waters. We must
    curtail the runoff from farms, from city streets, from other diffuse
    sources of pollution that get into our waterways and pollute them.
        Every child deserves to grow up with water that is pure to drink,
    lakes that are safe for swimming, rivers that are teeming with fish. We
    have to act now to combat these pollution challenges with new
    protections to give all our children the gift of clean, safe water in
    the 21st century.
        Of course, it matters how we do this, but I want to say, every time
    we have taken a big step like this, always somebody says, ``There they
    go again. They're going to hurt the environment.'' I heard it again last
    year when we tried to take economy--well, we did take very strong
    standards--steps to clean the air more. But I would just remind you, in
    the last 25 years every single environmental step we have taken has
    unleashed a new round of technological renovation which has helped us to
    grow the economy more rapidly, with new, higher skilled, higher paying
    jobs, opening up new careers and new vistas for people. It is simply not
    true that taking further steps to clean our water is a threat to the
    economy. As Larry said in a very immediate way, it is actually essential
    to ensuring the long-term stability of our economy.
        And that is consistent with the approach we are taking. We want to
    give the American people the tools they need to make the most of their
    own lives, including to safeguard our national resources. This is the
    approach the Vice President insisted on
    back in October when he directed the EPA and the Department of
    Agriculture to come up with a plan to ensure clean, safe water. And
    that's the approach embodied in the clean water action plan we unveil
    today.
        Here's what we want to do. First, forge partnerships through an
    innovative approach that gets everybody to focus on entire regions--not
    just on individual factories or individual sewage plants or individual
    farms but an entire region--and come up with the most cost-effective way
    to meet the clean water goal.
        Second, we want to work closely with States to identify the areas
    with the worst pollution problems and give local communities the tools
    and the resources they need to restore and protect those water
    resources.
        Third, we want to provide incentives to our farmers to take the
    actions that are needed to reduce polluted runoff from their fields and
    their pastures.
        And fourth, we have to protect public health through new strategies
    to safeguard the water we drink and the fish we eat. To help meet these
    goals, I have set aside in our balanced budget an additional $2.3
    billion over the next 5 years, over and above what we were spending
    before.
        Now, if Congress will approve this request, we will be able to
    finish the job set out in the Clean Water Act 25 years ago, restoring
    our waterways and providing clean, safe water to every American. I ask
    the Congress to work with us, as they did in passing the Safe Drinking
    Water Act, to provide new and more flexible tools to protect our water
    by reauthorizing an even stronger Clean Water Act this year. We have to
    do that.
        In the last 5 years, one of the most encouraging things I have seen
    is a willingness on the part of Americans from different walks of life
    to sit down across the table and try to figure out how they can protect
    our natural resources in a way that's good and fair for everybody.
    The Vice President and I--I spent a day; he

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    spent 2 days recently in Lake Tahoe, which is one of the two most
    perfectly blue deep-water lakes in the world--very much stressed now.
    And we were amazed to see people who just a couple of years ago were
    barely on speaking terms, people who thought they were conservative,
    hidebound developers who thought all environmentalists were insane tree
    huggers, and people who thought they were pure environmentalists who
    thought all developers were one step short of criminals, had shed all
    that, were actually--sit down, working with each other, because they
    finally realized they had a common interest in figuring out a way to
    preserve the environment.
        We've seen it in the Florida Everglades. We've seen it in the
    attempts to restore various wildlife, including the wolves, to
    Yellowstone Park. And we know we will have to see it if we're going to
    end this diffuse runoff problem that is polluting our water resources.
    We've seen it here in Maryland, where farmers are setting aside tens of
    thousands of acres to establish buffers between farms and waterways. We
    have just signed an agreement, interestingly enough, to provide some
    money to Minnesota so that they can have a program just like you have
    already implemented here. And in a State with 10,000 lakes, they need to
    follow Maryland's lead, and it will be good for America when this
    happens.
        I believe the secret to making the preservation and enhancement and
    restoration of our environment a part of the fabric of life in America
    is to have more opportunities like the Living Classroom, is to have more
    people like Larry Simns, who will go and talk to people who don't know
    what he sees every day, to have more enlightened leadership at the local
    level. But we in Washington have our responsibility, too. If you want
    those children who are here working in all these classrooms to live out
    their promise, then we have to provide a framework within which all
    these efforts can succeed. We can afford over $2 billion for clean
    water. We can do it and balance the budget. What we cannot afford is to
    walk away from our responsibilities to give all the young people in this
    audience and all the people out across America they represent the clean
    water they deserve in the 21st century.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 1 p.m. at the Living Classrooms Foundation.
    In his remarks, he referred to Larry Simns, president, Maryland
    Watermen's Association; Gov. Parris N. Glendening and Lt. Gov. Kathleen
    Kennedy Townsend of Maryland; Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore; Maryland
    Secretary of State John T. Willis; James Bond, president, and Parker
    Rockefeller, vice president, Living Classrooms Foundation.