U. S. Troops Readiness, Veterans' Health, and Iraq Accountability Act, 2007
Floor Speech
U.S. TROOP READINESS, VETERANS' HEALTH, AND IRAQ ACCOUNTABILITY ACT, 2007 -- (Senate - March 28, 2007)
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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, it is my intent to take a couple of minutes to lay out the reason it is so important to pass this county payments amendment this morning. Then I plan to yield 5 minutes to my good friend and teammate on this issue, Senator Craig, and then it is my intent to close for our side.
This issue of county payments funding is literally an issue of survival for rural counties across this country. It is going to determine whether the Federal Government will keep a more than 100-year obligation to rural communities or whether the Federal Government is going to turn its back on these communities and allow them to become national sacrifice zones.
Mr. President, 100 years ago, the Federal Government entered into an agreement with rural communities in exchange for creating national forests and restricting how local communities manage their forest lands. The Government would provide a partial payment so those local communities could pay for essential services, such as law enforcement and education. But the most recent law guaranteeing those payments--the law the distinguished Senator from Idaho and I wrote, the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act--has expired. If the law is not extended--the safety net payments rural communities need in order to carry out essential services--without those dollars, there will be havoc in rural communities across our country.
The votes the Senate is going to soon take are going to decide the future of a lot of these rural communities, and there are two approaches. First, there is the approach Senator Craig and I and a bipartisan group of 17 Senators favor that is flexible, that ensures we don't make the decisions in Washington, DC, we don't micromanage these local communities but give them the flexibility at the local level to make choices that make sense for them.
This legislation is sponsored by both Republican Senators from Idaho, both Democratic Senators from Washington State, and many others. We have a broad coalition. The National Association of Counties, labor groups, education advocates--all have said that the approach that makes sense for them is our bipartisan amendment, and they have not been in favor of the amendment offered by the Senator from North Carolina.
I am now going to make 5 minutes from our time available to my friend and colleague, Senator Craig. I thank him again for his support.
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Mr. WYDEN. I thank the Chair, and I thank my colleague from Idaho for an excellent assessment of where we are now, both with respect to the need here and our bipartisan amendment.
Here is what it is going to come down to, colleagues. There are going to be two different approaches. One is offered by the Senator from North Carolina, the other is a bipartisan one offered by many Senators, and I and Senator Craig have outlined it. Ours is supported by the groups that have the most expertise in this area: the National Association of Counties, educators, labor organizations, and those who are on the ground.
The Senator from North Carolina seeks to dictate from Washington, DC, how this program would operate. I will just say to the Senate, it seems to me what is best for Ashville, NC, may not be best for Amity, OR. Let's make sure these local communities have the freedom to make choices, make judgments with respect to essential services in the law enforcement area and in the roads area. I pointed out yesterday that if the approach offered by the Senator from North Carolina were to prevail, we couldn't, for example, do upkeep of rural roads, which get very snowy in the winter. If we don't make improvements in them, the kids aren't even going to get to the schools, which is the point my colleague from Idaho has mentioned as well.
As Senators think about this, I would like to also stress that this is not some kind of welfare program. I know many Senators are still not up on all the details. They do not live and breathe this subject on a daily basis as Senator Craig and I do, but these are not handout payments. This is not welfare. This is part of a 100-year deal which came about when the Federal forest system was created.
As we move on our side to the end of our presentation, I would like for folks to understand what the stakes are in rural communities and give some accounts from my State that are very similar to what Senators are hearing from officials in their States.
In my State, for example, the sheriff of Grants Pass--and I was recently there for a community meeting--told me that without county payments funding, he may have to call out the National Guard to protect public safety. The approach that is offered by the Senator from North Carolina wouldn't make it possible for those local law enforcement officials to be on the front lines in terms of fighting crime, in terms of fighting meth, which is a scourge in so many communities across our country.
The county commissioners of Curry County, a beautiful community on the Oregon coast, report that without county payments funding, they may have no choice but to dissolve their county altogether. They have already begun discussions with our State about dissolving the county. You can be sure if county payments funding is not available, those discussions will continue and, in my view, based on a recent community meeting there, I am of the view that their county may not survive.
Local officials in Coos County, just at the prospect of losing county payment funds, have already been releasing prisoners. So when people talk about what this issue can mean and what it really comes down to in local communities, this isn't an abstract issue in Coos County, OR. They have released prisoners--they have released prisoners--and they are going to lay off people who have had 25 years of service in that community. There are reports in the newspaper that they have already been terminated from their jobs, and I believe that we are going to see, in other communities across this country, similar problems.
I understand my friend from Idaho would like me to yield to him, and I am happy to do so.
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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I think the Senate has had a chance--and I thank particularly my friend from Idaho for coming to the floor today--to get a sense of what this issue is all about. I close by saying that Senator Craig and I and all those who have been involved in this issue understand that as a result of this updated, modernized approach to the Secure Rural Schools Act, we are going to make sure the rural communities of this country can survive and help them make a transition into other areas.
Senator Craig and I held many hearings and have heard from rural communities about how they would like to have very strong thinning programs. This is something you don't know a whole lot about in Baltimore, Mr. President, but we have a lot of overstocked stands in our part of the country. If you don't thin them out, it makes for a big fire risk. If you thin them out, you bring the communities together--labor folks, environmentalists, and others--and you deal with the fire risk and get the material to the mill. Plus you put people to work.
Senator Craig and I and others on our committee are prepared to have those kinds of programs. However, if these rural communities can't survive, and I am of the view that many of them won't without this amendment, then we are not in a position to look at the next steps, which are approaches like I have outlined for thinning and biomass, where we take the woody waste off the forest floor, which makes for clean energy. Senator Craig and I have heard a great deal of testimony about that.
I hope our colleagues will support the bipartisan amendment that Senator Craig and I have talked about this morning, along with 17 of our colleagues, and reject the Burr amendment.
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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I wish to continue the discussion on the point made by our friend from North Carolina. He is going to be the ranking member on the forestry subcommittee. He and I are going to sit next to each other for a great many hours during the course of this session of the Senate. I know there are going to be many times when we agree because that has certainly been the case during our long years of service, both in the House and it is now an honor to serve with him in the Senate.
I wish to pick up on a couple of points. Senator Craig, in the very important discussion he had with the Senator from North Carolina, pointed out that North Carolina already spends every dollar of their county payments money. The distinguished Senator from North Carolina indicated his concern about the 40-percent graduation rate in one of his school districts. But the amendment offered by the Senator from North Carolina will not provide an additional dollar for that school district because under his State statute, every dollar of county payments his State gets already has to go to schools, and the amendment would not change that.
I think this has been a very instructive discussion. As Senators consider the next 15 or 20 minutes of this debate, I want to come back to where the organizations that are most intimately involved in this program, on a day-to-day basis, stand.
The Senator from North Carolina made mention of our support from labor. We are very proud to have a strong cross-section of labor groups that are aligned with our proposal. But in addition, the support from the National Association of Counties and the National Governors Association for our bipartisan effort is particularly important. I wish to read a little bit from the National Association of Counties' letter to myself and Senator Craig. It says, with respect to Senator Burr--and the National Association of Counties does not talk about anonymous Senators. They are very much aware of who is involved in this debate. The National Association of Counties wrote:
While well-intentioned, we fear the Burr amendment is ill-conceived and would result in negative consequences.
They go on to say:
The Burr amendment requires ``new money'' to be spent on education. This would deny communities and their elected leaders to set their own priorities, superimposing a Washington, DC, one-size-fits-all mandate on those rural forest counties already severely restrained by the presence of tax-exempt federal land.
This is a particularly important point and a very telling one about this debate. I think the Senator from North Carolina and I have been in scores of discussions over the years where the charge always was it was the Democrats who were coming up with this ``big Government, run from Washington, DC,'' kind of approach. Here we are with a bipartisan amendment that I, as a Democratic Senator, spent a lot of time talking about with local communities, and the counties say they favor our approach because it does give them the flexibility on the ground--in Asheville, NC, and Amity, OR, across the country, to make the choices that are best for them rather than to have somebody inside the beltway take out a cookie cutter and stamp all these programs as if one size fits all. That point in the National Association of Counties' letter strikes me as extremely important as well.
The counties also go on to say:
. .....it appears that the Burr amendment would shift the hard-won increase to PILT funding [the payment in lieu of taxes program offered by the Wyden Craig amendment] away from the counties' general funds to schools, which was never the purpose of the PILT Act.
I say to my colleague, we are going to hear a lot of testimony about this in our forestry subcommittee as well. The changes in the PILT Program, in particular, so that every county with Federal land can get a boost, are going to be especially helpful as we make this transition.
Mr. BURR. Will the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. WYDEN. Of course.
Mr. BURR. Does the Senator agree with the letter from the commissioners that I affect the PILT payments in my amendment?
Mr. WYDEN. My understanding is that the Senator's amendment does not affect it.
Mr. BURR. Does or does not?
Mr. WYDEN. Does not.
Mr. BURR. So the letter and the accusation the Senator received from, I think, the counties, is, in fact, inaccurate?
Mr. WYDEN. My sense says the county folks had some difficulty following the Senator's amendment as it went through its evolution. But what we do know is our amendment clearly protects the PILT funding, and that is why it is preferable on all counts.
Now, continuing with what the counties have had to say: We are also concerned that the Burr amendment interferes with the authority States have had since 1908 to allocate forest reserves funds, authority explicitly and deliberately retained by Congress in title 1 of the Secure Rural Schools and Communities Self-Determination Act.
This point from the counties is especially critical because it goes to the 100-year obligation with respect to county payments. We can debate who has better ideas about PILT. We think we do. That is why so many Senators have been attracted to our proposal, because of the additional support for PILT. But what the counties go on to say here is they are concerned about the 100-year precedent with respect to Federal forest systems.
Mr. President, the Senator from North Carolina has been very gracious. We are dividing the time. How much time remains on our side?
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Whitehouse). The Senator from Oregon has 3 minutes 10 seconds remaining.
Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of our time to the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, a cosponsor of the amendment, and I thank him for his many hours of support in putting this together.
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Mr. WYDEN. Would the Senator from North Carolina yield?
Mr. BURR. I yield.
Mr. WYDEN. We continue to look at the language. I think it goes back to the reason the counties and the Governors were so troubled by it. Where in my friend's amendment does it say it applies only to increases in funding? Because, as we read it, it would apply to all of the funding in section (2) of the amendment, subsection (d) payments received by a State under subsection (a) and distributed to eligible counties shall be only for public schools----
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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I thank my friend and colleague from Washington. When we go to the two amendments on the Secure Rural Schools Act under the order, I have a couple of minutes and the distinguished Senator from North Carolina, Senator Burr has a couple of minutes. But since there was this opportunity as a result of the graciousness of Senator Murray, I wish to mention a letter that came in from the sheriff of Douglas County, which is in southwestern Oregon. This is an area he is policing, the sheriff notes, that is slightly larger than Connecticut. In other words, his county is extraordinarily large.
If this money is not forthcoming, funds that would be made available under the county payments, this is what the sheriff says will take place:
There are no Troopers. We are running out of deputies. And, if we lose access to this Federal funding, the people will essentially be left to provide their own public safety. There is no fallback position for the citizens.
The sheriff goes on to say:
This is not a matter crying wolf or exaggerating our problems. This is quite simply the fork in the road where we make a choice. Does local government in rural Oregon cease to exist, or are we partially and temporarily spared in hopes of securing some means of providing for ourselves?
I think the comments from Chris Brown, the Douglas County sheriff, which just came in, say it all. What the legislation we are going to be voting on in a few minutes is all about is ensuring the Federal Government keep its obligation to rural communities, where the Federal Government owns most of the land. This is not welfare. I have tried to go into how this came about several times in the course of the debate over the last couple of days. The reality is that when the Federal Forest System was created more than 100 years ago and these rural communities were in a position where they could not maximize their revenues from these lands, the Federal Government struck an agreement. The Federal Government said: We will be there to at least partially offer funding for the essential services such as those that Chris Brown, the Douglas County sheriff, has written to us about.
The reality is, the distinguished Senator from Washington knows--and we are very pleased that she is a cosponsor with 18 other Senators in the bipartisan ``county amendments'' legislation--we have huge problems in our part of the world, with serious drugs, particularly methamphetamine. What Chris Brown is saying, this Douglas County sheriff, with respect to his area--which is, as he notes, as large as the State of Connecticut--is that he is going to be essentially defenseless in terms of protecting public safety for his folks in southwestern Oregon without this funding. He is not alone. The sheriff of Grants Pass told me recently that without this funding he is looking at the prospect of calling out the National Guard.
We will have our debate for 2 minutes each when we go to this amendment.
I yield the floor.
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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I urge the Senate to support the bipartisan group of 19 Senators and vote for the Wyden amendment and reject the Burr amendment. In voting for the Wyden amendment and rejecting the Burr amendment, Senators will be standing with the National Association of Counties, the National Governors Association, the 1,500 member organizations of the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition and labor groups from across the land.
The Burr amendment purports to affect only the increase in funding but, as was pointed out in this morning's debate, the Burr amendment affects all funding, new and existing. As a result, the Burr amendment would stand in conflict with numerous State laws. The new formula in the bipartisan Wyden amendment is fair, fully paid for, and would ensure that America's rural communities can survive. I urge my colleagues to not walk away from the Federal Government's 100-year promise to rural America. Support the Wyden amendment and reject the Burr amendment.
I yield the remainder of my time to my friend and cosponsor, Senator Craig.
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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I urge the Senate to vote against the Burr amendment because it significantly undermines what the Senate just voted for. The Burr amendment purports to affect only the increase in funds, but, as was pointed out in this morning's debate, the Burr amendment would affect all funding, new and existing, and as a result, the Burr amendment would stand in direct conflict with numerous State laws.
What the Burr amendment would do is disrupt funding decisions and local government operations around the country. In many localities, county governments and school districts operate separate and distinct budgets. Under the Burr amendment, local government decisions would, in effect, be overturned and we would go to a one-size-fits-all Federal mandate instead of local communities deciding about their future and their kids' education. Their hands would be tied in Washington, DC.
I urge the Senate to reject this bureaucratic straightjacket and vote no on the Burr amendment.
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