Ralph Regula

Mr. REGULA

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Virginia.

Mr. REGULA. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, the gentleman is absolutely correct. We have no extra money. We are right to the allocation, which is, of course, about 11 percent less than last year. If we do not sell the 7 million barrels to pay for taking care of SPR the other money in the budget is going back into maintaining the SPR facilities in top-notch condition. Therefore if there is an energy crisis, if there is a threat to national security, we can get the oil out of the ground. If we fail to have the sale, as provided in the bill, we do not know where the $100 million will come from. I know where it will come from, it will come from letting the rest of the SPR facilities deteriorate. We have no extra money to do it so it is clearly a budget-buster. If Members are maintaining our reductions in the budget, if we are for maintaining an environmentally safe SPR we have to vote ``no'' on this amendment. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. REGULA. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, this is a budget-buster. Let me say it loud and clear, this is a budget-buster. We have in Weeks Island 70 million barrels of oil. Weeks Island leaks, so this is an environmental vote. A vote for this amendment is against the environment, because this leaking causes water to go into the oil. It allows seepage, and everybody agrees, we have to move the 70 million barrels. It is going to cost approximately $100 million to move it into another SPR location. The only place we could find $100 million was to sell 7 million barrels. Instead of losing $100 million, we will move 63 million and sell 7 million first. This is a last-in-first-out. What went in the last, the last 7 million that went in was $17.50 a barrel, not $33. The market today is close to that amount. Therefore, logically, for environmental reasons, for practical reasons, we have no choice. We do not have another $100 million. The gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Tauzin] mentioned national security. Let me tell the Members, we have SPR because of national security. However, if we do not take care of the SPR facilities, and I am talking about the hardware that is there to pump out the other 520 million barrels. We have 590 million barrels total. We want to sell only 7 million barrels out of a total of 590. The Secretary of Energy strongly endorses the sale, because if we do not sell this oil, the Secretary will have to take $100 million out of the rest of her budget which is designed to take care of the SPR facilities. Some of this equipment is almost 20 years old. It has to be replaced. If we do not, in a period of national security crisis, it very possibly will not work.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment, but I would like to withhold the use of my time so the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Tauzin] can speak.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, let me say, and again I respectfully submit that any Member can offer a point of order. If I were to withdraw, there will be another Member offer a point of order. The gentleman well knows this rule has been in place for along time. It was not established just in this particular term. It was a rule that was put in place by the gentleman's party. I think we have to respect the rules of the House. Clearly, this is subject to a point of order. If I as chairman of the committee were not to raise it, we have a lot of other Members ready to do so.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I respectfully submit that the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Kennedy] has discussed the merits of his amendment, but he has not addressed the point of order. I think the rules clearly state that this amendment is not in order at this time, or during the balance of the bill.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I make a point of order against the gentleman's amendment because it seeks to amend a paragraph previously amended. In the procedures in the U.S. House of Representatives, chapter 27, section 27.1 states the following: ``It is fundamental that it is not in order to amend an amendment previously agreed to. Thus the text of a bill perfected by amendment cannot thereafter be amended.'' Mr. Chairman, this amendment seeks to amend text previously amended, and is therefore not in order. I respectfully ask the Chair to sustain my point of order.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I rise to a point of order.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, it is the plan at this juncture to go forward and complete the bill tonight. We think that we can probably get it done in about 3 hours. We will roll the votes on an hourly basis. So essentially, give or take 10 minutes or so, when we get two or three amendments in about an hour, we will vote on those, a 15- minute vote and then five-minute votes to follow on however many amendments. Then we will go on an hour and roll again until we get finished.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. REGULA

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Allard], a member of the Committee on Resources, who was a key Member in working with the authorizers and the appropriators in a team effort to address a number of challenging issues in this bill.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Kolbe].

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Nethercutt], a newcomer in terms of service but an oldcomer in terms of knowledge to the subcommittee. The gentleman brings a great perspective on Western issues, particularly as they affect the State of Washington, and the areas surrounding, on forests and some of the river problems.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Mexico [Mr. Skeen] who is a very valuable member of our subcommittee, who brings a wealth of knowledge as a rancher to some of the tough problems that confront us, as well as a leader in the Western matters and with the cattle association, and other things.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Taylor], a very good member of our committee and a Member who has done great service on handling the Forest Service issues and who brings to it a lot of knowledge. (Mr. TAYLOR asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, first of all I want to thank those of my colleagues that supported the rule because I think we have a good bill here given the fact that we are under the constraints of the Budget Act which reduces our amount of money over 10 percent, and also I want to say to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Yates] and the members of the subcommittee on both sides of the aisle that we had a very bipartisan subcommittee. We worked well together. We tried to be as totally nonpartisan as we had to make these difficult choices, and we did as much as possible to address the challenges of the Interior and related agencies' responsibility with the funds that were available, and I think on balance we did a good job of achieving that. The gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Yates] and the whole team worked well; the staff and the associate staff worked as a team. We worked very closely with the authorizers. I say to my colleagues, ``There isn't anything in this bill that's not approved by at least the chairman and the members of the authorizing committee so that what we have here is a team effort.'' Mr. Chairman, obviously we are going to have differences, and that will be reflected in the amendments, some substantial policy issue differences. I will say at the outset, ``We'll do everything we can to expedite this so Members can get home but not in any way stifle debate in the process.'' I am going to be very brief in my opening comments here. I think it boiled down to three areas, as I would see it, given the constraints of the budget reductions. First of all, we had the must-dos. The must-dos were keeping the parks open, keeping the Smithsonian open, keeping the visitor facilities at Fish and Wildlife and Bureau of Land Management open to the American people. Two hundred sixty million Americans enjoy the public lands, and they enjoy them in many ways. They enjoy them in terms of looking into the Grand Canyon and seeing a magnificent thing created by our Creator. They likewise enjoy going out and fishing in a stream or hunting in a national forest. They enjoy going to a Fish and Wildlife facility to see how we propagate the species of fish and how we nurture the fishing industry. They enjoy going to the Bureau of Land Management facilities, the millions of acres. So, Mr. Chairman, we made every effort to do those things that the public enjoys, and we held the operating funds at roughly a flat level given our constraints, meaning that we would in no way restrict public access to these great facilities that people care a lot about, and about a third of the United States is public land owned by all of the people of this Nation, and we make every effort to insure that their experience with that will be very enjoyable, and that led to the second category of things, and that is the need-to-dos. As I see it, the need-to-dos were to insure that sanitary facilities at our national parks, and forests and other facilities were good. The need-to-dos included fixing a road if it is in bad shape. It included finishing buildings that were under way. I say to my colleagues, ``You can't stop a construction job in midstream, and those things had to be taken care of, and we have done so.'' The third group was the nice-to-dos, things that are nice if we had the money. There are a lot of activities that we could no longer afford to do. Many of the grant programs had to be terminated, some of the research programs in energy. We had to downscale land acquisition 78 percent. We put in, of course, some money for emergencies, but essentially we will not be doing additional land acquisition because I tell my colleagues, ``When you buy lands, you have to take care of it, and that gives you enormous downstream costs.'' We did some construction where it was necessary to finish buildings, but we do limit new construction. We limit new programs so that we had some tough cuts that we had to make in the things that are nice to do. Mr. Chairman, we just had a lot of discussion on the NEA, and of course the NEH is similar to that. We have had change. We eliminated the National Biological Survey, and rather than that we have a natural resource science arm in the U.S. Geological Survey. But we are not getting into that now because that will come up to the debate. I think we have addressed energy security. We want to be sure that the United States will be secure in the future, that we will have energy independence, that we will not have to depend totally on foreign sources, and so we have addressed that in our bill to the best of our ability. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is our responsibility, and in the bill we said at the outset we are going to take care of education, the basic education, for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the basic health. That is the responsibility [[Page H 6930]] of the Federal Government, and as much as possible we have level funded that along, as I mentioned earlier, with what we were able to do in keeping parks and so on open. There are lot of other things I could say about this legislation. I simply want to say again I think it represents common sense, I think it represents a responsible use of the funds available. I endorse the fact that we are downsizing the budget, that we are going to get on a glide path to a balanced budget in 7 years. We do not fund programs that have large outyear costs simply because we would not be able to address those in the future. I just want to close, because I think it reflects the overall philosophy in this budget, with a statement by Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Alan Greenspan, to the Committee on the Budget, and he said, and I quote: I think the concern, which I find very distressing, that most Americans believe that their children will live at a standard of living less than they currently enjoy, that that probably would be eliminated and that they would look forward to their children doing better than they. That is a significant statement because it says very clearly from one of the economic leaders of this Nation that, if we can balance the budget, we will leave a legacy for our children of a better standard of living than we have, and that to me is what this is all about. That is what we are trying to do here, and not only do we want to try and leave a legacy of a better standard of living by using our resources more wisely, but we are also leaving a legacy, in my judgment, in the way we have handled the responsibilities of public lands that will be even better for their enjoyment, and that is the challenge we face as we deal with the amendments here today. We will try to keep that in mind. Thomas Jefferson said, ``The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.'' In this bill I think we are responsibly exercising that important role. Mr. Chairman, at this point I ask that a table detailing the various accounts in the bill be inserted in the Record. [[Page H 6931]] TH13JY95.000 [[Page H 6932]] TH13JY95.001 [[Page H 6933]] TH13JY95.002 [[Page H 6934]] TH13JY95.003 [[Page H 6935]] Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. REGULA

Mr. REGULA. I will respond to the gentleman by saying that that will be an interesting conference.

Mr. REGULA. I think that our conferees on an authorization bill will feel obligated to hold to the amount that we have agreed upon in this appropriation.

Mr. REGULA. That is correct.

Mr. REGULA. That will be the bottom line in a conference, I would say to the gentleman.

Mr. REGULA. If the gentleman from California will yield further, the answer is that we made it subject only to the authorization by the House and not be the other body.

Mr. REGULA. Yes.

Mr. REGULA. In response to the gentleman, let me just say that it is our every intention to respect the amount that is in the appropriation bill when we go to conference and, second, that will be in the authorizing bill.