I welcome General Van Winkle and Ms. Tornblom, who is representing Dr. Westphal before us. I know the Corps has done its best to survive the crossfire you must often find yourself in more frequently than not these days.
The Corps has always been very responsive and worked hard to try to balance the difficult and often competing issues that land on your desk. In my opinion, you have done so not only without the support of the White House political leaders, but you have done so despite their active attempts to undermine the Corps. We do not need pollsters to tell us who their least favorite agency is.
The future of the Corps is critical to my State and this nation. To understand how critical, one must only look at the history of the Corps. The record of the Corps in terms of flood damage prevented, lives saved, economic development, and other national benefits speaks for itself.
To understand the broad bipartisan support for the mission of the Corps one must only look at the programs and projects authorized and funded by this Congress and the policies suggested by the Administration that this Congress has rejected.
The new policy that we will reject, on a bipartisan basis, in my view, will be the proposal to raise local cost share from 35 percent to 50 percent which creates this class system of flood control whereby only the rich urban communities can apply for the means to protect their homes or jobs.
I have a couple of issues that the Corps' witness's can comment on for the record. One has to do with this situation where you are now on the outside looking in as the Fish and Wildlife Service drafts the new Missouri River operating plan.
While many in this room disagree honestly and passionately about where this should go, I regret that this Administration directed the Corps to work with the agencies and the states to seek a consensus and then after 5 years and scores of meetings and difficult negotiations at which F&W; personnel were present, we learn that Washington has thrown that out all and turned it over to the F&W.;
If F&W; should have it in the first place, then Washington shouldn't be wasting the time, resources, and energy of our states who naively thought that Washington was serious about including and listening to them.
Another apparent swan song of the White House and CEQ are the new 11th hour proposed guidelines that are designed to make flood control more difficult to achieve. These came out of the White House and I need to know if re-writing these guidelines will be subject to public comment and which of the existing projects will be revisited.
Also, for the record, could you provide the Subcommittee your analysis of what our foreign competitors are doing with respect to modernizing their water resources? As much as we would like to pretend that the rest of the world may not exist, I do not believe we can answer the question that is the subject of this hearing without this context.
Finally, I want to welcome the other panelists here today.
Mr. Faber, from American Rivers has been very active in my region and has been willing on occasion to take the risk of developing a balanced consensus on river management. He has always been fair in his personal dealings with me and we have even conspired a time or two to work on environmental legislation and his efforts deserve some credit for the trend we all support to make the Corps projects as green as possible.
However, I want to raise one final issue with respect to literary licence that has to do with a column written in the Mississippi Monitor (Volume IV, Number 3 March 2000) in which the author who is testifying today castigated projects which is his prerogative but he also went overboard, in my opinion, in castigating the uniformed people managing the projects.
People who have distinguished records of military service, who are decorated for their honor and sacrifice and who have served tours in Vietnam and Desert Storm, deserve the presumption of innocence and deserve more respect than is incorporated in the editorial which convicts them of wrongdoing and suggests "..top military officials who contributed to this culture and gave direct orders to cheat should be digging latrines in Kosovo by the time you read this."
I can assure you I do not always agree with them either and investigations will lead where they lead on any relevant matters but while I have enjoyed working with American Rivers on a number of these issues and respect their opinion, I was disappointed to see this rather reckless attack on our uniformed people and believe we should be focusing on the merits of the projects leaving out unhelpful adhominem attacks on people who have a record of dedication to our country.