National Forests, Parks, Public Land, and Reclamation Projects Authorization Act of 2007

Mr. President, I have listened patiently to what has been said. One of the things that has to be stated, if we want to change the rules of the Senate, that is fine, but it is important for the American people to know what a unanimous consent request is. This bill contains 26 separate pieces of legislation where on over four dozen of them we have had no objection whatsoever, ever. Not one time have we raised any objection. But a unanimous consent request says, No. 1, you agree with the legislation. No. 2, you don't think it should be amended. No. 3, you don't think the Senate ought to vote on it. We have a major difference of opinion about what priorities are and what they should be.

I heard the distinguished Senator from New Mexico talk about frustration. Who is watching out for the frustration a child born today, encompassing $400,000 of unfunded liabilities, is going to have when that bill comes due? Where is the worry about the frustration for future generations? People say this is noncontroversial. Let me tell you, it is controversial when you are talking about infringing on the property rights of people without their permission. That is controversial. We have a difference of opinion on that. We think heritage areas and the disclaiming of heritage area has no impact on property rights.

That is absolutely untrue. It does impact. Property rights are a real right guaranteed in this country. We are going to set up boards that will influence, with the money we give them, private property use and utilization without an equal influence by the private property owners. We do have a difference of opinion.

At the end of this fiscal year, September 30, the accrued actual debt on the books for this country will become $10 trillion. We are going to add $3,000--2,800 and some odd dollars--per man, woman, and child at the end of this year to the debt. People say it is noncontroversial. Four dozen of these are noncontroversial. But this idea that we have to authorize, it is either a wink and a nod, or we are totally dishonest with the American people. If we are authorizing it, we intend to spend the money. We wouldn't be authorizing it if we didn't intend to spend the money. My objections are not that we do the right things for protecting our parks or creating the right environments in our forests and ensuring that the great treasures of our country are not protected. I want to make sure they are available. But to claim, when we have a $9 billion deficit in terms of backlogged work in our parks right now, as documented by the U.S. Park Service, $9 billion of work that needs to get done that we can't get done, to say this isn't going to have any impact on it, it is going to have an impact. It is going to delay the maintenance on the very things we say we treasure. So what have we done? What are we doing?

We are having a discussion about a small area that supposedly doesn't cost much money. It hasn't been scored, but those things in it that have been scored, it is over $350 million per year, a third of a billion dollars. What are we talking about? This debate is about whether we face up to the priorities in front of us as a nation. It is not about being against parks. It is not about being against the process. It is about making sure somebody in this body is standing up thinking about the future finances of this country and what we are going to do to our children. This is another example of what I believe--and I know I am in the minority--is a misplaced priority. How do we justify it, when we own, as the Senator from New Mexico said, 30 percent--I thought it was 38.5 percent--of all the land in the country? When we are not taking care of the land we have, how do we justify adding more land? We added 90 million acres to Federal Government property in the last 8 years. That is 90 million acres that are taken off the property rolls of communities and States. We take it away. We control it, and then we don't take care of it. But now we are adding more. We are doing it more.

Let's talk about some of the issues. This is a noncontroversial bill is what we have heard. How about $2 million of our kids' money to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Robert Fulton and the Claremont? At a time when this year we are going to borrow $600 billion, we are going to spend $2 million on a celebration? Why don't we celebrate the fact that we are going to put our kids in debt more? That is what we should be celebrating, if we are so proud of this. How about $2 million to create a commission to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the voyage of the Champlain. Do we have $2 million to throw away? We are going to throw that away on something that is not important, considering where we are in this Nation and the debt and the heritage we are going to leave our children. You bet we have a difference of opinion.

The American people want us to start thinking in the long term, not the short term. Do we look good if we have done all these bills back home? You bet. We wink and nod and say: We are doing it. Either we are going to appropriate the money or we were dishonest with them in the first place. We are going to spend the money. How do we walk out of here and say: We got you what you wanted? We do not really intend to spend the money--unless we really do intend to spend the money, so then it really does make a difference, and we cannot maintain what we have.

There was a very wise historian, his name was Alexander Tytler. This is attributed to him. I am not sure it is really his, but the words were spoken. They are not mine, but it is very apropos for where we are, not just on this

issue; I am not a voice of frustration just on this issue. My colleagues know that. I think it is time for us to start thinking about the long-term in this country and not the short-term politically expedience that says we look good at home.

Here is what Tytler said: A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits--we got you done what you want done at home; whether we can afford it or not does not matter, but we got it done--with the result that a democracy always collapses due to loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

That is the history of the world. We are contributing to our own demise as we think short-term political expediency so we can look good at home, so we can satisfy demands at home.

Will Durant said:

A great civilization is [never] conquered from without

until it has destroyed itself [from] within.

We have now $79 trillion worth of unfunded liabilities that we are getting ready to lay on our kids and grandkids, and we are not thinking a thing about probably $1 billion with this bill of new additional expenditures for next year, if it gets appropriated. It is the price of doing business in Washington. We do not have that luxury anymore. We do not have the luxury of mortgaging the future of our children anymore.

Why is the dollar at a historic low right now? Is it because we are in a slowdown or a recession? Is that it? No. It does not have anything to do with it. It has to do with the world confidence in our ability to repay our debt and the debt the rest of the world sees coming to us, which comes out to, if you were born today, $400,000 over your lifetime. Now, how many of us have children or grandchildren who could absorb just the interest on $400,000? A few, but most of us could not do that.

So this debate is a philosophical debate. I am not worried about being a source of frustration in the Senate. I am worried about the future of our country, and if I create some scrapes and bruises on my way to wake us up to what the American people want us to do--which is think long-term, fix the structural problems, and quit pandering back to our individual desires in the State--this Congress has become a parochial Congress. It is more important to do what is right for your State than it is for what is right for the country. How dare us. That has nothing to do with our oath. None of us has our State mentioned in the oath we take when we accept this office.

So we are about to pass 62 pieces of legislation, none of which had a hearing until after they passed out of the committee--17 hearings post coming out of the committee. As to saying we have to meet this because it is bipartisan, it is a bipartisan failure to think about the future of this country and what is in the long-term best interests of the country, as we satisfy looking good at home to ensure our next election is put ahead of the next generation of this country.

I am not going to participate in that. I am going to continue to work to make sure any piece of legislation that comes to this floor is thinking about the long-term, not the short-term. If that creates ill will among my colleagues, I apologize in advance. I would much rather be remembered as somebody who was interested in protecting the future of our children than playing nice in the Senate. As Phil Gramm said: I didn't come here to make friends, and I haven't been disappointed.

The real fact is, what did we all come here for? We all came here with that in mind, to do what is best in the long-term interests of our country. It is important for us to be reminded when we are not doing that. There can be a difference of opinion about priorities. There cannot be a difference of opinion about the amount of trouble we are in. There is no difference of opinion in terms of trouble. It does not matter how we got here. The fact is, we are here. We are in trouble.

How is it that we put a delegate for an island territory in this bill that has 60,000 residents that we are going to put $5.6 million into over the next 3 years? That we are going to create another delegate-- what does that have to do with natural resources and lands? How did that get in here?

We have added an intermodal transportation center in Trenton, ME. It authorizes the Federal Government to pay 40 percent of it, no matter what it costs. There is no limitation that this will be a competitively bid contract. No matter what it costs, we are on the hook for 40 percent of whatever it costs. And we are on the hook for 85 percent of what it will cost to run it thereafter. The only problem is, there are three other visitor centers within walking distance of this one. But we wanted to do it.

I could go on and on and on. The fact is, this debate is not about process. It may be to you, but it is not to me. This debate, for me, is whether we are going to change our behavior at every point to start thinking about the long-term future of this country.

I have the greatest respect for Chairman Bingaman. He has been an absolute gentleman to me in every way in every dealing. But we have a philosophical difference. He is charged to move bills out, to get things done. Most of them that have no cost he will readily agree I have had no objection to. He knows that. We have not tried to block those. But they are combined with the other bills because they know that is a force to create the votes, to get things that might be somewhat more controversial spending. That is his job. I understand that.

I have no ill will toward anyone. What I have an ill will for--and when I leave the Senate, what I will take to my grave--is not being good enough to convince us to do what we swore an oath to do, and that is to think long-term, think what is best for our country, not what is best for our State; think what is best for our children, not what is best for us; think what is best for our country, not what is best for our party; think what is best for America. We are losing. Consequently, we see it happening in our country.

So it is time to really clarify what this debate is about. It is really not about a lands bill; it is about the philosophy where we continue to work and run like a loose barge in the Mississippi River that does not have a tug associated with it. Are we going to do that? Because that is what is happening.

One amendment I am going to be offering just says we ought to know what things cost. How much land do we have and how much does it cost to have it? We are going to have it objected to, not because it is not common sense but because we are afraid the whole package might not get accepted if something common sense is in it like knowing how much our land costs us, knowing how much land we have, having an inventory, and making a judgment, a metric about what we are doing. Nobody is thinking the big picture. We are thinking the political picture. So here is the amendment. It is not going to go anywhere, most likely, but it absolutely makes common sense that we would do that, that we would know all the properties we own.

We have another amendment that is going to say that citizens have to give their approval when somebody comes onto their land who does not own their land--just basic property rights saying: If somebody is going to set up a heritage area, they ought to get permission to come onto private land, if it is your land and somebody is coming on it. We take that right away in heritage areas. It is gone. They do not have to do it. It is a commonsense amendment that says if you own land, you ought to have the right that is guaranteed you under the Constitution to have your land protected. It is your land.

We have so much unwanted property where all the land agencies want a way to get rid of it, but yet they cannot. They cannot. They do not even have the money to get rid of it. So there is an amendment that says: Let's take 1 percent of the cost of this bill and allow the different agencies to get rid of the excess properties they have. It is not complicated.

The other thing is, we are going to offer an amendment requiring that citizens within a national heritage area are informed of the designation before it happens. If we are going to pass a law that is going to impact somebody's private property, shouldn't we tell them ahead of time? Shouldn't they have notice? Shouldn't they have the

rights guaranteed to them under the Constitution?

I have spoken enough, but I think under the guise of the lands bill I have explained the real problem. There is a difference of philosophy. I will not stop fighting until we start thinking about the long-term problems facing this country.

I will not stop objecting to spending money that we know we intend to spend. We are just playing the game that: Oh, it is not an appropriation. Well, almost 30 percent of the appropriations are not authorized. So you cannot have it both ways. A third of the money we appropriate under the appropriations process is not authorized to begin with. So authorizations actually do not mean anything, do they? Or do they? Yes, they do, because they are not going to get appropriated, or they are, and if they are, we ought to be talking about real money that is going to be spent.

I want to talk for a minute about the backlogs in our parks because I think if the American people knew it, they would not stand for it until we did something. The National Park Service faces, right now, a $9 billion backlog. That is their number. That is not Tom Coburn's number. That is their number, a $9 billion backlog. With this legislation, they are going to take on more responsibility with no increased funds, which means the backlog is going to grow.

The Facilities Management Division of the National Park Service reveals there are at least 10 States where National Park Service maintenance backlogs exceed $100 million per park--$100 million per park. Twenty States have facilities with deferred maintenance exceeding $50 million. That does not include road maintenance, which is far higher. None of these numbers include the road maintenance we have not supplied the money for either.

They maintain 1,466 buildings built before 1900 but do not have the money to maintain them. They have 4,975 buildings constructed before 1950 but do not have the money to maintain them. They have 2,500 fixed assets--2,500 fixed assets--they do not want but this committee will not create a way for them to get rid of. They are still spending money on 2,500 facilities--2,500 different buildings--that they do not want, that they spend money on every year, that they are not using, but they have to keep it up.

The National Park Service has 31 sites in California alone. They have a State backlog, in California parks alone, of $584 million, exclusive of any roadwork. California is home to many of our treasures: Yosemite, Golden Gate, Sequoia.

New York national parks: They face a $347 million backlog--$347 million--home to Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty has a maintenance backlog of $185 million, work that needs to be done on it. We are not doing it.

National parks in Wyoming: a $205 million maintenance backlog. That is Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Devils Tower. Yellowstone has a $130 million backlog. It is one of our great treasured western assets. Everybody who visits there has total enjoyment from it, and yet it has a $130 million backlog which we have not addressed.

There are no increased authorizations for maintenance backlogs. Glacier National Park in Montana, a backlog of $400 million; Washington, DC, home to our monuments, a $371-million maintenance backlog; New Mexico, $41 million; Arizona, $192 million. The National Parks Conservation Association said this: The average budget shortfall among 100 park units is 32 percent. In other words, we are supplying two-thirds of what they need to maintain their parks adequately, and with this bill we are going to be adding to all that and other lands other things they are going to have to be doing because of this bill, but we are not going to address the real needs.

Each of the new projects in this bill will siphon funds away one way or the other, directly or indirectly, from these important projects. Are we good stewards if we add things to be stewards of when we are not caring for the things we have already?

There was a wise man who once said: He who is faithful with small things will be faithful with big things. I would surmise and put forward to this body that we have not been good stewards with what we have already. Yet we are going to add to them.

Amendment No. 4522

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 4522, and I ask unanimous consent that it be read and that Mr. McCain be added as a cosponsor of that amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, this is a straightforward amendment. It requires an annual report of the Federal Government detailing the amount of property the Federal Government owns and the cost of Government and landownership to taxpayers.

This is just a small chart that shows the amount of land the Federal Government owns. As my colleagues can see, two-thirds of the Western United States is owned by the Federal Government in one form or another. It recognizes all of the core land, the parkland, the forest land, the heritage areas that are not--it doesn't recognize the heritage areas that we don't own, but it does recognize all the land holdings. Nobody has a metric on what we own. Not any one agency knows what we own in total, nor does anybody know

what it costs us to own it, nor does anybody know what it costs the communities for us to own it because it has been taken off the tax rolls.

Each year, the Office of Management and Budget would be required to issue a public report detailing Federal landownership. The report would specifically include the total amount of land in the United States and the percentage that is owned by the Federal Government; the percentage of all U.S. property that is controlled by the Federal Government--not necessarily owned, but controlled--the total cost of operating and maintaining Federal real property, including land, buildings and structures; a list of all Federal property that is unused and vacant-- because why should we continue to maintain properties that are unused and vacant--including all buildings and structures; and the estimated cost of the maintenance backlog at each Federal agency with regard to their land holdings.

What this will do is give the taxpayers some transparency about the real nature of what we are doing. We are going down an alley blindly. We don't know what the cost is. We don't know what the total is. We certainly don't know what we are creating when we add more to it when we don't know the metrics on what we have already.

One of the things we need is greater accountability on the maintenance. It is strange to me that we can do what we are doing with this bill and not already know this information. Why would we not know what our total land holdings are and what their costs are? There are no requirements under current law to require public disclosure of the amount of land controlled by the Federal Government or the cost of such occupation to the taxpayers. There was an Executive order issued in 2004 that would require some of it to become publicly available, but what this amendment says is it all should be. It is an inventory. Every other organization, including the States, know what they own, and they know the cost to manage what they own. It is called management accountability. Transparency is the thing that leads to accountability.

When the President directly required the Office of Management and Budget to release a high-level report giving a picture of property ownership between 2004 and 2005, the Government decided to stop releasing the information on public domain lands. Wonder why that is. What happened is 90 percent of the lands aren't reported. So this amendment would legally require the Government to release information on all land it owns, how much it costs to maintain, and require the Government to track the growth of Federal landownership around the country.

This isn't hard to do. Once you have the database, all you do is add and subtract. The first year it will be tough. Every year after that it would not be hard at all. It is a computer program.

Governments track the property that individuals own. The Government therefore should disclose the same information about the land holdings that it has. The Government knows what land we own. Why shouldn't the American people know what land the Government owns? It is just common sense. If we want to manage our resources and manage our properties, then we have to know what it is and what it costs, but we don't. We don't use zero-based budgeting. Whatever they spent last year, they just ask for more. At the end of the year, if it is not all spent, they make sure they spend it; otherwise, they are liable to get a cut. So we are not putting the money in based on what we know the need is; we are putting the money in based on a historical record that is obviously failing to maintain our national parks.

I will discontinue with any further debate on this amendment and yield to the chairman of the committee. I would just say commonsense knowledge about what we own and what it costs us is something the American taxpayer ought to have, and to vote against this for some reason because we can't goes back to the same philosophical argument. We are going to have the short-term excuse for the long-term problem, and we are never going to get out of this hole.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, would my colleague yield for just a moment so I may respond?

I want the chairman of the committee to know that we worked very closely with OMB as we developed this amendment. This is not a significant cost because they have been gathering this data to a certain extent already. I would gladly take a second-degree amendment to offset any sensitive

data that might be incurred so it would not be made available.

There is no question there is some cost to it, but the yearly cost is minimal, and OMB has already stated that. The cost of establishing it, yes, I agree, it would be hard. But what my colleague has said is we really don't want to manage all of the properties because we don't want to know. That is the important thing, that we can't directly manage them unless we do that.

So I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I think we will finish well before 2:15. That is my hope. So if we are looking at votes, I hope they will have some notice about that time. I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and bring up my amendment No. 4521, and I ask unanimous consent that Senator McCain be added as a cosponsor of the amendment.

I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, the American Farm Bureau and American farmers and ranchers had endorsed all of these amendments at an earlier time. I assume they would again, because it is the same language that was used in the past. Today, the National Taxpayers' Union endorsed these as commonsense freedoms for us.

This amendment is pretty straightforward. It says that if the Government wants to take your land, you ought to be able to say, yes, I agree or you ought to be able to say no. What this bill does is it authorizes the Federal Government--they can still acquire new lands, but if it is going to have an impact on your land--not their land but your land--the citizens ought to get a vote on it. It is called real transparency in government and real participatory democracy.

A lot of Americans are concerned about the excessive Government influence over their land. We can say they are not, but they are. People in my State of Oklahoma, in New Mexico, New York, and every other State have great concerns about property rights. This amendment is intended to address those concerns. It simply requires the citizens affected by Federal Government land grabs, or heritage areas, or others where we are talking about private lands being impacted, to have a vote, to have a say in the matter. It authorizes the Departments of Agriculture and Interior to continue to acquire land by purchase or exchange. It will not affect that.

The amendment would only apply to situations involving Federal eminent domain, when the Government takes property without the consent of the owner, or State and local governments cede private land to the Federal Government. The decision to cede property to the Federal Government may be voluntary by the State and local governments, but such a decision impacts the whole community. So all residents of an area, therefore, should have a voice in the decision to turn over public property that is controlled by bureaucrats in DC.

Do you realize that in all of our Western States, any single bureaucrat has more control in that State than the Governor of the State, where they own the majority of the land? Their implied power is greater than the highest elected official in the State. What they say goes, because it is the Federal Government. So whether it is a park ranger or forest ranger or manager of a forest or the BLM, what they say has more power than what the chief executive of any of those States says. When we look at this, we are saying if the Federal Government is going to take something by eminent domain, the people it will impact should get a chance to say yea or nay.

This goes back to the concept that we have a real right to own and hold property in this country. That is something many countries don't offer their citizens. We ought to be about protecting it at every level.

This amendment would involve local residents in Government decisions about their neighborhoods and communities. Sam Adams profoundly questioned, ``What liberty can there be where property is taken away without consent?'' What liberty is there when your property is taken away without consent or impacted without your consent or your zoning ordinance, because some bureaucracy from Washington funded through a heritage area decided what the zoning ordinances are going to be and has millions of dollars to move it, to your detriment, the private owner of property. What liberty is there when property rights are taken away? This amendment ensures both liberty and consent. It is very straightforward. It doesn't affect Federal transportation projects, national defense, or homeland security.

Delegating property decisions is not unusual. Eminent domain has been exercised through both legislation and legislative delegation. It is usually delegated to another government body. But the power may be delegated to private corporations, as we saw in Connecticut, such as public utilities, railroads, and bridge companies.

This amendment will delegate the final decision to the property holders who are being impacted--real property rights. If we agree as a majority, it happens; if we disagree, it doesn't.

The Supreme Court has approved the widespread use of the power of eminent domain in conjunction with private companies to facilitate urban renewal, for low-cost housing, for deteriorated housing, and the promotion of values, as well as economic development. In Berman v. Parker, a unanimous Court observed:

The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive.

The values it represents are spiritual as well as physical,

aesthetic, as well as monetary. It is within the power of the

legislature to determine that the community should be

beautiful as well as healthy, spacious, as well as clean,

well-balanced, as well as carefully patrolled.

This ever-expanding government power essentially allows Congress and unelected bureaucrats for any reason to take private property from citizens with little, if any, recourse. What liberty when property rights are not preserved?

This amendment is designed to provide some check on the ever-growing expansion on private property rights within this country.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am going to try to move this debate forward. I see the Senator from Washington. Does she have debate on a specific amendment or comments on the bill?

Mr. President, we are going to try to get through our time agreement. I have two more amendments, if that is agreeable with the Senator from Washington.

I will make one comment on what the Senator from New Mexico said. What I heard him say is there is something wrong with people deciding it. The real concept of our country is we get to decide, and we have bastardized that by saying the Federal Government knows best.

I believe the people out there kind of know how things impact them. I think a plebiscite about what we are doing would be something that almost every American would welcome.

Will there be problems with it? You bet. Democracy is messy, but it is free. Giving them the right to have that answer and to vote, that is something that was guaranteed in the Constitution before we had an activist court that took it away. This is about putting it back.

Amendment No. 4520

I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 4520 be called up, and I ask unanimous consent that Senator McCain be added as a cosponsor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, this is another straightforward, what I believe most Americans would agree with, commonsense amendment. It says citizens within a national heritage area are informed of the designation and that governing officials must receive permission to enter private property. It is simple.

If I am in a heritage area, what happens often now is those who are empowered by the heritage area stake and survey your land, do all these things without your permission to enter your land--your land, not their land, your land. What we do is we broadly give the ability to violate property rights through the heritage area laws so people can access private property without permission. If I am wrong about that, then this amendment would cause absolutely no harm. But the fact is, I am right about it.

This amendment reestablishes the right of private property owners to control who goes on their land, when they go on their land, and what they are doing with their land. It reaffirms that if you have ownership, it is your land, and it does not take that right of a property owner away because it happens to be in a heritage area.

More and more heritage area designations are being made with little knowledge of the landowners involved. S. 2739 establishes three new heritage areas and extends the authorization and funding of several existing national heritage areas.

There is no requirement for the Federal Government to notify the individual within the area of its designation or its meaning. If we are going to have national heritage areas--and I agree at points they are great--do we not have an obligation to tell the landowner their land is getting ready to be subjected to all the parameters associated with a national heritage area? Do we not have the right and the obligation to ensure their property rights are protected as they are brought into a national heritage area?

I believe the Constitution says we ought to do this, we ought to restore what was already there. What is liberty without the rights of property?

I yield back the remainder of my time on this amendment.

Mr. President, in response, I wish to take a moment and read what three experts say about what the Senator from New Mexico said.

James Burling, principal property rights attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation:

The so-called protections for private property are largely

symbolic; so long as regulators can browbeat landowners into

becoming ``willing sellers'' we will continue to see the

erosion of fee simple property ownership in rural America.

With the influx of federal funding, the regulatory pressure

on landowners to sell will, in many cases, be insurmountable.

The legacy we will leave to future generations will not be

the preservation of our history, but the preservation of a

facade masquerading as our history subverted by the erosion

of the rights that animated our history for the first two

centuries of the Republic.

Joe Waldo, president of the Virginia property rights law firm Waldo and Lyle, said this:

The bill before Congress has nothing to do with a

``heritage trail'' but will result in a ``trail of tears''

for those least able to stand up for their property rights.

This is no more than an effort to overreach by the federal

Government with regulations that will restrict homeowners,

farmers and small business people in the use of their

property.

I ask unanimous consent, because of time limitations, to have printed in the Record the rest of these comments.

Mr. President, here is what I would say in response to the chairman's comment. It is not unreasonable to have somebody who does not own your land, has no real business on your land, ask permission to come on your land. That is an absolute subrogation of the rights guaranteed under the Constitution which we are now embracing and say it is fine to not have to get permission. That is not what comes with property rights under the Constitution. If our defense is we do not believe in the Constitution and the rights of private property rights, then I would say we are misguided in what we are doing.

This is a simple way of saying, if we are going to have heritage areas and if I am a private property owner in a heritage area and you want to come on my property and survey, you ought to have to get my permission. You should not be able to come on my land without permission to do so.

The fact is, example after example--and I will submit additionally an article from the Nation magazine on examples of exactly what happens in heritage areas to private property rights. It is called ``An Ugly Heritage.'' I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this article.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 4519 be the pending business. I also ask unanimous consent that Senator McCain be added as a cosponsor.

Mr. President, I will try to do this fairly quickly because I know we are under a time constraint. Amendment No. 4519 requires 1 percent of the----

I will be happy to yield.

Senator McCain.

Senator McCain contacted me and asked me, requested to be a cosponsor of my amendments.

All four of these amendments, yes.

Mr. President, this amendment requires 1 percent of the new spending authorized in this bill to be used to dispose of excess, unused, and unneeded Federal property to offset some of the cost of the bill.

What we know is we have a tremendous backlog in our parks. We have a tremendous backlog in almost every land ownership we have. We have tremendous maintenance needs in the Forest Service and tremendous maintenance needs in BLM. We are suffering to care for what we have.

All this amendment says is take 1 percent--they listed 6,500 different

items they want to get rid of--and use the money to help them get rid of them so they do not continue to spend money maintaining what they don't want and don't need. At a minimum, this bill authorizes $380 million of new spending, which only represents a fraction when we actually see what will happen. We will track this. My staff will track the actual spending that comes out of this bill in terms of appropriations so we will have it for historical reference. My amendment says to take 1 percent for use to get rid of these items and then take them away. When we have gotten rid of the excess items, we would not use the money to do that and that money will go to maintain the public parks we all value so much. It will help offset the hundreds of millions of dollars of new spending in the 2,000 property assets that in the Park Service alone have been slated for disposal but cannot be sold off solely due to the lack of funding to get rid of them.

So all this does is it directs some authorization and says: Park Service, take these 2,000 things, here is some money, get rid of them-- the things you want to get rid of. And everybody agrees we should get rid of them. They haven't because they don't have the money because they have to go through all these various steps under the Federal Government's property rights legislation. But we say to them: Here is the money, so you don't continue to spend money on that, and instead you continue to spend money against this $9 billion backlog in our national parks.

What this does is it allows them to get rid of assets they no longer need. This gives them a way and the funds to do that. It allows them to truly dispose of what they want to dispose of.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, how much time do I have?

Mr. President, I will speak a minute or two, and then I will yield the Senator from Washington 5 minutes.

We actually have a time agreement on the vote, so I am happy to yield the Senator some of my time, is what I am trying do, so I end up finishing. Is there a certain amount of time you need?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from the Congressional Budget Office dated January 31, 2008.

Mr. President, this letter shows a cost of $320 million for these bills over the next 5 years. So this is the Congressional Budget Office. This isn't my paper, this is theirs.

I will spend a few minutes, and then I will yield back my time because I know people want to get to some votes.

Absolutely.

Assuming appropriation. Yes, it does.

If it is not appropriated. But we are not passing these bills under the assumption they are not going to be appropriated. We are passing these bills under the assumption they will be appropriated.

As a matter of fact, the promise is made as we pass this. And either it is a hollow promise you are sending back home so you can say, yes, I did this, and lie to your constituents, or we are going to appropriate the money. It is one or the other. So either we are dishonest with whom we are telling we are doing something for or we absolutely intend to appropriate it. There isn't any other option.

I will finish up by saying this. Obviously, the senior Senator from New Mexico did not hear my earlier comments. We are in tremendous economic straits in the long term. This debate is not about the lands bill. It is about will we change the philosophy, will we honor our oath, and will we start doing what is right in the long term for those who come after us. The heritage we have embraced in this country is one of sacrifice--one generation sacrifices so the next has opportunity. If we keep doing this without regard--we don't know how much we are spending; we don't know how much the monthly costs are; we are not taking care of the parks as we should because we do not have an idea; we have a hodgepodge; we have a barge floating down the river without a tug on it--we are going to make the problem worse. I will remind my colleagues, the true accounting of this year's estimate is a $607 billion deficit. That is over $2,000 for every man, woman and child in this country. Every child born today in this country inherits an unobligated obligation they will have to pay, that they got no benefit from, of $400,000.

Am I frustrating the Senators from New Mexico? You bet. Are our children worth it? You bet. I am not going to stop. I am going to stand and say we are going to think long term, we are going to start protecting property rights, we are going to start thinking about our children, and we are not going to give up because we get lectured because we are not doing it the way we have always done it. The way we have always done it has us bankrupt. It is time for a change. Republicans and Democrats alike, our children are worth it.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent we vote on the amendments in the order in which they were presented.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we yield back all time on all amendments so our colleagues who have planes and things they want to do can get them.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Madam President, last Saturday, I held two town meetings in Vermont on the collapse of the middle class, and both of them were very well attended. Our guest speaker was Elizabeth Warren, who is a professor of law at Harvard Law School and one of the leading writers in this county on economic matters.

In preparation for that meeting, I sent out an e-mail on my Web site just asking people in Vermont to tell me their personal experiences regarding what is happening to the middle class. We have done that in the past and, frankly, I expected we would get a couple dozen responses. What happened was really astounding to me and speaks about what is going on in the economy in this country today. Over a period of a few days, we have now had some 500 responses, mostly from Vermont, but also I do a national radio show, and we made a similar request nationally, and we have had some from out of State. They are mostly from Vermont, some from out of State, but a total of some 500 responses.

What was absolutely astounding was the nature of these responses. They were so powerful, so overwhelming, that, in fact, they were sometimes difficult to read. Person after person wrote with amazing honesty and with an articulateness which comes from telling the truth. They were not giving a great speech, as we often do here in the Senate, talking about everything under the Sun. They were talking from their own hearts. They were talking about what it means to be trying to raise kids, trying to send your kids to college, trying to pay your fuel bills, fill up your gas tank when you get to work--amazing stories. We are going to post many of them on our Web site.

What I want to do this morning, because I think it is terribly important that the Senate hears from ordinary people to get a sense of what is really going on in America, the struggles people are having-- maybe it is a good idea we hear from the people rather than just campaign contributors, rather than just lobbyists. The language I heard that came to my Web site was extraordinary. So what I want to do this morning--I have the feeling I will be doing it more than once--is just have you listen to what people have to say, reading exactly the words they have written to me.

Let me begin by reading an e-mail that came from a small town in northern Vermont. I am going to do my best to disguise the identities of the writers. But this is from a small town near the Canadian border. This is what this writer says.:

My family has been squeezed for years now. My husband and I

have two children. My husband works full time and has a

degree. He works 60 miles away from home, and has tried to

find a new job closer but has been unable to do so. I tried

for 2 years to find a job, when I could not find a job I went

back to school. I am hoping that my degree will help our

family.

The price of gas and oil now consumes 30% of our disposable

income. We have cut back on groceries, and recently was only

able to get groceries because my parents were nice enough to

give us money. We are going to buy a woodstove because we are

afraid we will not be able to afford oil next year. We do not

qualify for LIHEAP. My husband got a raise last year that

disappeared on Jan. 1st when the cost of our health insurance

increased. We have to have reduced cost lunch for our

children, we cannot afford to put our children on his health

insurance plan, and luckily they are on Dr. Dynasaur--

Which is the SCHIP program in Vermont--

but now we have to pay a premium where we didn't last year.

We have stopped doing any fun things. We have not been able

to go out to eat in a long time, or to bring the kids to see

a movie. There are no treats. I am praying that after I

graduate I will be able to find a job to help my family out.

Of course when I go back to work both my husband and I will

have to start paying our student loans, and this payment will

amount to about $500 per month. But what other option do we

have? I couldn't find work. He can't find a better job closer

to home.

Both my husband and I have degrees, we did everything

right, we are not doing better than our parents when they

were our age.

If it wasn't for our parents we would be worse off. Our

parents have helped us with oil. My parents gave us $600 last

year to pay for our oil, my husband's parents helped us with

car repairs so we wouldn't go into debt. My parents have

given us grocery money and bought our kids school clothes. I

don't know what we would do without our parents.

This is demoralizing, my husband keeps asking when will we

be able to actually afford to support our own family? I'm not

sure what the answer is.

Thank you for listening.

That is a letter from a woman in northern Vermont.

This is a letter from a woman in north central Vermont whose job, it turns out, was outsourced. This is what she writes:

My husband and I are in our mid-fifties. At this time of

our lives we should be at our peak earning power, putting

money away for our retirement. Two years ago, we were, but

now we are making about $42,000 between us and struggling

through this Vermont winter.

I was an international IT manager, making a nice salary

then. I spent 14 years getting my AS, BS and then my Masters

degree from Champlain College.

Which is a college in Burlington, VT.

We were comfortable, and able to go on a nice vacation

every couple of years. Then the company I worked for for 18

years outsourced its entire IT operation to India. I received

a layoff package, but at my age it took me a while to find a

job for one third of my previous salary, and that job is not

even in my field--I am an accounting technician now.

My husband was laid off from a job as an electrician's

assistant and he is now working in a hardware store. He makes

$3 less per hour now.

Both of our moms are near 80 and live with us. We also help

to take care of our next-door neighbor, who is 83. We are

struggling to keep up with our bills. Fortunately when we

refinanced our home several years ago, we took a fixed

rate mortgage. Even so, our heating, gas and even grocery

costs are rising so quickly and our salaries are not.

When I was younger, I found it easier to regroup from a

loss like this, but then everyone wanted to hire me when I

was younger. I thought the government was ``of the people, by

the people and for the people,'' but it seems to me that it's

mostly ``of the people, by the lobbyists and for the rich.''

By the time we get to retirement, maybe when we're 70 at this

rate, Social Security and Medicare will be gone and we'll be

on our own. I feel as though our government has sold us out

and even if we elect a new President who cares for the

people, it will take too long to recover for us to reach a

comfortable place again.

Thank you for listening Senator Sanders.

This is a very brief e-mail that we received from a small town in central Vermont:

Between my retirement & SS [Social Security], I get a grand

total of $804 a month. My last oil delivery was over $600 for

the month of March.

That's my story--and I'm stuck with it.

Thank you, Senator, for trying to ``make it better.''

This is from the wife of a logger in northern Vermont. A lot of people in the State of Vermont earn their money in the woods. They go out and they cut trees.

This is the toughest time I have seen since I was a child.

My husband is a self employed logger and has an excavation

business. The way the economy is has really hit in both of

his employment very hard. The price of logs have dropped

drastically and no one is building.

He has extremely high blood pressure but some how we can't

receive any help. We do have catamount blue health insurance

that we pay $250.00 a month for but that does not cover some

of his medicine nor does it cover all hospital bills. We have

exhausted any savings we had but still have a small IRA but

cannot touch that with out being penalized. We have had to

refinance our home of 34 years and I have just started a job

but it requires me to travel 35 miles one way to work and

with the price of gas it is almost a hopeless case.

I'm sure there are other people in worse shape than us, but

I have to wonder why the government is not helping the

working person? The only thing I guess a working person has

is pride.

Is it worth it?????? I'm really beginning to wonder!

This is from a 57-year-old working widow, again from the central Vermont area. This is what she says:

I have no--

Underline ``no''--

disposable income. Like many Vermonters I drive a long way to

my job and consider myself lucky to have one and like most

jobs in Vermont it does not pay as well as the same job in

other areas of the country. My roundtrip mileage is 60 miles

per day. I invested in an America made hybrid in 2004 which

gets between 25 to 30 mpg [miles per gallon]. Also, the

organization I work for does not reimburse me at the federal

rate for the miles charged to them. I have to have more and

more money each week to pay for that week's gas and then wait

to be reimbursed. It really is a tough squeeze and some of my

co-workers are in tighter spots.

I was fortunate to have locked in fuel oil last Spring at

$2.46/gallon for 800 gallons. This is to supplement wood

burning. However, I fell on the ice in December and hurt my

shoulder which makes lifting wood difficult therefore I

turned the thermostat back to 60 and live that way. Now the

thermostat is back to 50 and the burner only comes on to heat

hot water. I stopped using hot water to wash my clothes over

a year ago and just use cold water. I don't notice a

difference.

I have not had a vacation except a long weekend in years.

At 57 and a widow and a woman, I can look forward to living

in poverty. I am thankful for the things I have and pray that

I can hold onto them. I have first hand experience that there

are many, many Vermonters that have much less and are falling

through the cracks. They do not have enough food to eat and

are ``too rich'' for fuel programs.

I have a friend who is legally blind and lives on less than

$800 per month. She lives in Senior housing so her rent is

subsidized but she still has to pay for utilities and food.

How does she buy food and clothing on this pathetic amount of

money?

How can we be the richest nation in the world and allow

this to happen?

I vote. I give to charities when I can albeit small amounts

but how can I move mountains? I pray for peace and justice

because I don't know what else to do and I am thankful for

what I have and for what I am able to do.

I appreciate your keeping important issues before the

public.

As I said, these are stories from Vermont. But we have received similar-type stories from all over America. Let me conclude with four stories from families in States other than Vermont.

This is from a young man in Tulsa, OK:

Thank you so much for allowing me to tell the story of how

our family is being squeezed by the current economic

conditions in our country. . . .

In December of 2000, I started work for my current company

at the ``bottom rung of the ladder.'' I was changing careers

yet again and the old saying ``you can't start at the top''

certainly applied. I have since worked my way up from a

starting position, part time at $7.65 an hour, through 3

promotions and into a management position in the mid $30k a

year salary range. That used to be an ok salary here in

Oklahoma. Not anymore.

The rising cost of fuel, food, utilities and other

necessities has turned my ``ok'' salary into a near poverty-

level experience for my family. In addition to the above

mentioned costs, I experienced a $102 per month increase in

my portion of the premium for my ``employer provided'' family

health coverage.

I don't get it. I work hard, every day. I show up on time

every day, give it everything I have and never back off and

somehow everything except my salary is going up at an

alarming rate. My parents taught me that no matter what, if

we worked hard enough and never gave up, we'd get somewhere.

It seems these days, that doesn't hold true anymore.

Please encourage your colleagues in D.C. to do something,

and hurry. I am doing all I can and it just isn't enough.

This one is from a young engineer in Gladstone, OR:

I am a 26-year-old college graduate with a master's degree

in mechanical engineering. I have been working for two years

as an engineer in the Portland, OR metropolitan area, and

though I consider my compensation for my job to be

appropriate for my level of education and expertise (about

$60,000 a year), I am still struggling to make ends meet in

this economy.

Despite the fact that my home mortgage payment has remained

stable, I am finding that the average price of energy and

commodities has increased such that I can no longer afford to

contribute to my 401(k) retirement plan, and I am living

month-to-

month with only about $200 in savings. I pay about $300 for

gasoline, $200 for heat, $100 for electricity, and about $400

for food every month. This is fully twice as much as I was

paying for the same expenses just 2 short years ago. Ouch!

My situation is ironic and a bit frustrating. Whereas I now

make over four times what I made as a graduate student, I

live with the same quality of life as I did in college. I

cannot afford vacations or extravagant purchases, and I am

burdened as so many people are these days with a persistent

worry about getting sick or injured and stuck with a medical

bill that I cannot afford.

I realize that I am nobody special in terms of how hard I

work or how much I pay for food and gas or how ``sad'' my

story is, and that is why I write to you. I am moved by the

stories of how these middle-class families are surviving, and

I can sympathize with them in terms of some of the financial

worry they are experiencing. It is hard for me, it must be

incredibly difficult for them.

Thank you for your time and thank you for your service as a

U.S. Senator, and thank you for providing a forum like this.

This is from a 30-year-old man from the Pacific Northwest who feels the American dream has failed him. This is what he writes:

I was raised in extreme poverty. My mom had a 9th grade

education and my father dropped out in 6th grade. My brother,

3 years my senior, dropped out of high school in 1996, the

year I graduated. I never knew a house; we grew up in one and

two bedroom apartments. I also never knew I was raised in

poverty until adulthood--when I tried to transcend this state

of economic marginalization.

I was the first of my family to graduate high school. Four

years later I entered junior college; transferred to a

private four-year institution and earned both an

undergraduate and graduate degree. I also earned $70,000 in

student loan debt. At that point, I had never earned more

than $7,000 in my life.

Three years after college, I purchased my first home. You

guessed it--my loan was predatory and was one of those ARMs.

This was the first home ever purchased in the Ryan family. As

you know, to truly gain a firm stance in the middle class,

one must own property.

I earned $50,000 in 1997, more money than I've ever known.

Yet I still have to charge my groceries or medications. My

ARM matured and my mortgage raised $300 over night. The first

home in my family is likely to go back to the bank and I'm

falling short of the finish line in the race out of poverty.

I'm now in credit card debt just to buy the essentials and

my student loan debt haunts me most days of my life. I feel

disillusioned by the ``American dream and the American middle

class.'' If you graduate, if you go to college, if you . . .

then you will rise above the poverty line. Let me tell you,

Mr. Sanders, I feel more impoverished today than I ever have.

Why? Because when I was poor, I didn't have nearly $100,000

of debt; essentially making me indentured to my country. That

isn't freedom.

Finally, an e-mail from a woman in California in a city near San Francisco. This is the last letter:

Both my husband and I have faced significant pay cuts the

last year. We feel grateful to still have jobs, however. Many

of our friends our age have no jobs and have been out of work

for many months with no prospects in sight.

We have 3 children and live in the high-cost San Francisco

Bay Area, where we were born. A combined income of $100,000

to $150,000 doesn't go very far at all here when a modest

townhouse costs almost $600,000 and everything else is

proportionately more expensive. (The difference in the cost

of living across the country is never taken into account by

politicians planning tax breaks and should be . . . )

Our oldest daughter completed 2 years in Ameri-Corps after

graduating from the University of Vermont where she got a

Bachelor's degree in environmental science and conservation

biology. Some of her student loans were forgiven by Ameri-

Corps, but not many. Now she works for an environmental

consulting firm in Boston but her wages are so low she can

barely support herself and we are still paying $350 per month

on her student loans that remain. We will owe $350 a month on

those loans for the next 30 years--she has close to $70,000

left to pay off.

My husband is almost 61 and I am 52. We have nothing saved

for retirement. One small IRA we have will be cashed out this

year to pay for a new roof on our townhouse. We can barely

meet our mortgage payments, property taxes and pay our bills.

We live month to month.

Over the past year we have cut out many of the extras we

used to consider necessities. My husband felt extremely

guilty running up a charge card to buy much needed clothes

for himself for work. He had not bought clothes for himself

in about 5 years.

Our home is now worth less than the loans we have on it.

There is no money to replace our old rug, (or even have it

professionally shampooed), no money to fix our broken clothes

dryer, no money to repair our bathroom sink, no money to take

even a modest vacation for a few days. The list goes on and

on.

We no longer have what we once considered a middle-class

standard of living. Now we are nearing retirement years

realizing we will have to work (if we have jobs) until we

die. How could we ever exist on Social Security alone in this

area? It would be impossible since we will not have our home

even close to paid off.

I have never felt so despondent about the state of our life

and our family's prospects for the future. We have slid down

the economic ladder one rung at a time. I used to believe if

we worked hard enough we would be rewarded for our work--but

no longer believe that. We are working harder than ever and

now make far less money. I see no improvement in our

financial well-being in the future whatsoever.

I am beyond anger. I have no more tears. I only have two

questions that no one seems to be able to answer.

Mr. President, I think it is appropriate to end on this note, and this is what she says:

I have only two questions that no one seems to be able to

answer. Is everyone in Washington so far removed from the

plight of our country's middle class that they cannot see

what we are going through? Or do they see and simply not

care?

I yield the floor, and I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I wanted to say a few words in support of the Clean Energy Tax Stimulus Act, an amendment to the housing bill offered by Senators Cantwell and Ensign. Before I begin, let me thank Senator Cantwell for her determined efforts to ensure that we don't stand by while our renewable energy industry and energy efficiency industry lose jobs due to expiring tax policy.

In these times of economic uncertainty, while we work to create new jobs in the green economy of the future, we must also make sure we do not lose existing jobs in the small green economy we already have, and Senator Cantwell, along with many of my colleagues, has made that a priority. I thank her for that.

The clean energy tax stimulus amendment which the Senate is expected to vote on later today and which is based on a stand-alone bill introduced last week, which I am strongly cosponsoring, extends financial incentives for renewable energy and energy efficiency that would otherwise expire this year, and that is something we must make absolutely sure does not happen.

More specifically, the amendment would extend for 1 year the current production tax credit--commonly called the PTC--which supports the generation of electricity from renewable energy such as wind, biomass, and geothermal. Additionally, the amendment would extend for 8 years the business investment tax credit which provides financial help for larger scale fuel cell and solar investments and the residential investment tax credit that helps homeowners by giving them the tax credit for up to 30 percent of the cost of a solar PV unit and up to $2,000 for the installation of solar hot water heaters.

Finally, in terms of energy efficiency, the amendment we will vote on today would extend for 1 year the current credits for energy efficiency improvements for heating and cooling systems, windows, and other qualified residential property, and it also extends the tax credit for building homes that are energy efficient. In addition, the amendment extends tax credits for the purchase of energy-efficient appliances.

As you know, wind energy is the fastest growing source of energy throughout to entire world. Unfortunately, in our country today, the wind industry is seeing a dropoff in investment which will quickly lead to the loss of thousands of jobs. This is totally absurd. The American people want to move to sustainable energy. They want to move to wind energy.

There are businesses out there prepared to build and install wind turbines. Yet we are not providing them the help they need to help us deal with global warming and also to create many good-paying jobs. Every month that passes without a production tax credit extension diminishes the industry's capacity to create jobs, spur economic growth, and produce electricity that helps us reduce global warming. In fact, the American Wind Energy Association projects that the rate of growth in American wind power will decrease by more than 70 percent between this year and next in the absence of an extension of the production tax credit. This is totally absurd. All over the world, countries are growing good jobs in terms of wind, and we are on the verge of losing jobs despite the fact that the American people want to move us toward sustainable energy. What we are doing contrasts sharply with the current trend of dramatic wind power growth that could otherwise be expected to continue. People want sustainable energy, people want wind power, and here we are sitting back, not providing the help the people in the wind industry desperately need.

If we do not extend the PTC, we will waste a tremendous opportunity to preserve existing jobs, create many thousands of new good-paying jobs this year alone, and build, in addition, another 5,000 megawatts of new wind energy, which will spur another $10 billion in economic activity.

Let me say a few words about the solar tax credit. The investment tax credit is responsible for an estimated 6,000 high-quality jobs that were created in the solar sector in 2007 alone, and another 9,000 to 12,000 are expected in 2008 if Congress sends the signal that this tax credit is here to stay. That is, of course, exactly what we must be doing.

Without an extension of the ITC, some have estimated that we would lose over $8 billion in investments that would have been made, leading to a net loss of almost 40,000 jobs in the solar photovoltaic sector alone in 2009.

The ITC has real implications also for utility-scale solar projects. I have talked to people in the solar thermal plant business, talked to some of the major utility companies. We have a potential in this country to produce an enormous amount of clean, relatively inexpensive electricity through solar thermal plants which are now beginning to move in the Mojave Desert, in

Nevada, in New Mexico, and Arizona. It turns out that based on the geography of the Southeast, there is enormous potential for dozens of solar thermal units that could produce a significant amount of electricity that our country needs. That electricity could be produced at a reasonable cost, in an effective way, emitting virtually no greenhouse gas emissions. It is sitting there waiting to happen, and our job has to be to help those people in the utilities that want to move forward. Without an extension of the ITC, these types of projects will be in jeopardy or, in fact, face a significant delay.

Additionally, we are seeing a new solar powerplant located 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, AZ, and scheduled to go into operation by 2011 which would not go on line without the benefits of the ITC. The 280- megawatt facility is expected to generate revenue of over $4 billion, bringing over $1 billion in economic benefits to the State of Arizona and enough electricity to power 70,000 homes. The solar thermal unit being planned by Pacific Gas and Electric would provide electricity of 553 megawatts for over 400,000 homes.

All of this is sitting there waiting to happen, and all over the world people are wondering, What is the U.S. Congress doing to stimulate this type of activity? Today is our day.

Let's take a quick look at the importance of extending the PTC and the ITC, but let's not forget that extending these credits has a ripple effect on other sectors of the economy. For example, the American Council on Renewable Energy estimates that for every job created in renewable manufacturing, there are an additional three high-quality jobs created to design, install, operate, and maintain the renewable energy infrastructure.

So I think it is pretty clear that we must act today to, at the very least, extend some of the current renewable energy and energy- efficiency tax credits. I myself hope we are going to go a lot further than this, but what we have to do is an absolute necessity.

Let me conclude once again by thanking Senator Cantwell for her leadership on this issue. This is enormously important. The rest of the world is moving in order to deal with global warming, in order to create good-paying jobs. We have to pass this legislation today, and we have to go beyond that in the future.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding its adoption the Landrieu amendment No. 4389, as further modified, be further modified with the changes at the desk.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding the unanimous consent agreement, the Murray amendment No. 4478, as amended by the Mikulski amendment, be agreed to.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I know my colleague from New Mexico will be here in a few minutes and wishes to make a statement in support of the legislation that is before us now. I will start by making my own statement, a general statement about it. I know Senator Wyden also is here on the Senate floor and wishes to speak on this issue and on this legislation. I know, of course, Senator Coburn is also very nearby and wishes to make a statement as well.

The Senate will consider at this time S. 2739. It is a collection of over 60 noncontroversial bills that have been reported from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee dealing with various public land, national park, water, and territorial issues.

Let me start by thanking Senator Reid, our majority leader, for making it possible for us to proceed with this bill at this time. This has been a priority of his for several months now, to get this legislation before the Senate. He deserves great credit for doing that.

All of the individual bills included in S. 2739 have been passed by the House of Representatives and virtually all of the bills--or their Senate companion measures--have also been favorably reported by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The committee votes on reporting these bills have been unanimous.

Typically, these bills would be considered individually and passed under a unanimous consent agreement. Unfortunately, as most Senators are aware, it has become virtually impossible to get unanimous consent to pass anything this year. So despite the fact these bills generally deal with State-specific issues and have the strong support of the affected congressional delegation, and despite the fact that these bills are noncontroversial--having passed the House of Representatives and having been reported by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee with overwhelming bipartisan support--we have not been able to get them cleared.

In an attempt to move these bills forward, last month I introduced S. 2739, which simply incorporates every bill our committee has reported that has also been passed by the House of Representatives. The package includes roughly an equal mix of Democratic-sponsored bills, Republican-sponsored bills, and bills with bipartisan sponsors. As I have already noted, since these bills have been reported out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee by unanimous votes, there really are not any outstanding issues in dispute. Many of the individual bills that are included in this package have been on the Senate calendar for several months; in fact several were reported by our committee and have been pending on the calendar since January of last year--not January of 2008 but January of 2007. A number of the bills have been approved by the Senate--by unanimous consent, I might add--in previous Congresses, in some cases in several previous Congresses.

While the individual bills in this package may not be controversial, they are nonetheless very important to the individual sponsors, and the Senate has an obligation to try and pass these bills. I would like to take a few minutes to briefly identify some of the provisions included within S. 2739.

The bills included within S. 2739 encompass lands and activities in over 30 States and the District of Columbia. The first provision in the package is Senator Murray's and Senator Cantwell's proposal to designate the 106,000-acre Wild Sky wilderness in Washington State, which the Senate has passed in each of the last three previous Congresses. The Wild Sky wilderness is an important addition to the National Wilderness Preservation, and has strong local and national support.

Another provision in the bill includes language sponsored by Senators Wyden and Akaka to give the National Park Service important new authority to enter into cooperative agreements to protect threatened natural resources in national parks.

S. 2739 also includes additions to the Minidoka National Monument in Idaho and Washington State, the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site in North Carolina, and the Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts, and the bill provides the National Park Service with important new authorities at Acadia National Park in Maine and Denali National Park in Alaska.

It authorizes studies of potential new parks in Missouri, Texas, Arkansas, California, Arizona, and Massachusetts to assess whether any would be appropriate for addition to the National Park System, and it establishes commissions to commemorate significant anniversaries of the Hudson and Champlain expeditions in what are now the northeastern United States.

S. 2739 would designate two new Outstanding Natural Areas to be managed by the Bureau of Land Management: the Piedras Blancas Historic Light Station in California, and the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse in Florida. It also allows for BLM land in Nevada to be transferred for use by the Nevada National Guard.

The package includes a new addition to the Wild and Scenic River System in Connecticut, and a new addition to the National Trails System, the ``Star-Spangled Banner'' National Historic Trail in Virginia and Maryland.

The bill includes authorizations related to new commemorative works in the District of Columbia, including one honoring President Eisenhower, and establishes a commission to study the potential creation of a National Museum of the American Latino, here in Washington.

S. 2739 would establish three new National Heritage Areas: the Abraham Lincoln National Heritage Area in Illinois; the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area in New York, and the multi-State Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Area in Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and it authorizes studies of potential new heritage areas in Oregon and Kentucky. It would also increase the authorization ceiling for several existing heritage areas.

This bill will help address the water resource challenges facing many regions of the country. There are 16 provisions in the bill affecting States west-wide, including sections that will promote partnerships between the Federal Government, States, and local entities in the area of water, including paying for security costs at Bureau of Reclamation facilities; ensure a better understanding of groundwater resources; facilitate a feasibility study of serious proposals to address water shortages and avoid litigation; transfer Federal property to local ownership and eliminate Federal restrictions impeding water conservation projects; promote water recycling activities; and authorize Federal participation in the Platte River Endangered Species Recovery Program, which is strongly supported in Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming.

Given the critical nature of many of these items, it's important that these water-related authorities be enacted as soon as possible.

S. 2379 also reauthorizes two energy programs at the Department of Energy. One clarifies the Secretary of Energy's authority to make grants to advanced energy efficiency technology transfer centers under the Energy Policy Act of2005, and the other reauthorizes the Steel and Aluminum Energy Conservation and Technology Competitiveness Act of 1988.

The package contains two important measures related to the territories. The first involves the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands--CNMI--to respond to longstanding Federal concerns regarding immigration, labor, and law enforcement--concerns that are greatly heightened following the September 11 attacks. This bill culminates 11 years of congressional and executive branch efforts to extend the U.S. immigration laws to the CNMI including the establishment of Federal border control as anticipated by the 1976 covenant agreement between the CNMI and the United States. The bill also includes special provisions to meet the special needs of the islands' economy. The citizens of the CNMI have been U.S. citizens and members of the U.S. family for over 20 years, but they have been unable to participate in

American democracy as have the other territories. S. 2793 rectifies this by authorizing the election of a Delegate from the CNMI to the House of Representatives, a necessary step if we are to keep faith with our Nation's founding principle of representative government.

The final title of S. 2739 would make numerous amendments to the Compacts of Free Association between the United States and the Pacific island nations of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau.

As lengthy as that summary of the provisions in S. 2739 was, it reflects only a portion of the bills that have been considered in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee this Congress. This package reflects only a first step of Energy Committee bills that need to be considered this year. As soon as S. 2739 is passed, I will assemble a second package, with a similar number of bills, containing legislation that has been approved by our committee, but which has not yet come over from the other body. Like this package, the second bill will be a wide-ranging collection of authorizing measures.

But regardless of whether the individual items in that package are large or small, all these bills will have been reported by our committee after a full public process. I know many Senators who have bills that will be, in fact, in that second package rather than in this first package and are eager for us to move ahead. I would point out the New Mexico-specific bills I have sponsored will be in that second package; they are not in the legislation before us today. So I share in that desire to move expeditiously, and I look forward to working with Senator Domenici and the majority leader and, of course, the Republican Leader as well to try to get that second package ready for floor consideration as soon as possible.

Senate rule XLIV requires the chairman of the committee of jurisdiction to certify that each Congressionally directed spending item in any bill coming before the Senate has been identified and disclosed on a publicly accessible Congressional Web site. The rule defines ``congressionally directed spending items'' as spending items ``included primarily at the request of a Senator.''

Although I included none of the House-passed bills in S. 2739, primarily at the request of a Senator, in the interests of full disclosure I have provided a list of all spending authorizations for specific amounts targeted to specific localities contained in S. 2739, along with the name of the sponsor of the Senate companion of the House-passed bill.

This list has been made available on the Web site of the Committee of Energy and Natural Resources since March 11 and was previously printed in the Congressional Record on March 11, at page S. 1869.

In addition, I ask unanimous consent that the list, along with my letter to the Majority Leader accompanying the list, be printed in the Record for the information of all Senators.

While I have previously tried to describe all the provisions in the package, I believe the individual sponsors can better describe the merits of some of their specific provisions. I am sure many of them will want to do so.

Passage of S. 2739 will not only allow us to send this to the House and then to the President, it will also allow us to move forward and address the many legislative pending requests within our Energy and Natural Resources Committee that have been awaiting consideration behind this bill.

I think it is important to remember all the individual provisions included in the package were previously approved by the House of Representatives. I know in a few minutes the Senate will also be considering four amendments that have not been approved either in the House or by our Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

To ensure that we do not jeopardize the enactment of S. 2739, I will be opposing all those amendments, and I will urge my colleagues to do so as well, so we can finally pass this bill in a form the House can quickly pass and send to the President for his signature.

As I indicated before, I know Senator Domenici wishes to make a statement.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me respond on this particular amendment that the Senator from Oklahoma has presented or called up for consideration.

The amendment does require the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to post an annual report on the Internet that details quite a few different things. First, how much land is ``within the jurisdiction of the United States;'' second, how much of that land is owned by the Federal Government, both in total and on a State-by-State basis; third, a description of how much it costs to maintain all lands, buildings, and structures on an agency-by-agency basis; fourth, extensive information on the number of unused and vacant assets and the value of operating costs for each such vacant asset; fifth, the estimated maintenance backlog of each Federal agency, presumably on these various assets.

The amendment does not just apply to national parks and national forests and reclamation projects and public domain lands which, of course, our committee would have jurisdiction of, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, but also the national wildlife refuges, Indian trust lands, GSA properties, post offices, military bases and facilities, veterans hospitals. And those, of course, are under the jurisdiction of other committees I do not serve on.

To give a sense of the breadth of the amendment, the Office of Management and Budget would have to provide detailed information each year on approximately 1.2 billion real property assets worldwide and over 636 million acres of land.

There is no provision in the amendment to exempt any sensitive information that the Department of Defense might wish to withhold or the Department of Energy or the CIA or any other agency that has a national security responsibility.

While there is certainly room for improvement in Federal property management--and in that regard I agree with the Senator from Oklahoma-- I do not believe we are ready to act on this amendment at this time or adopt this amendment. I believe compliance with the amendment would be very burdensome, time consuming, and expensive, and, of course, it is a responsibility that would have to be updated each year.

My own view is, this amendment, if proposed as a freestanding bill, would not be referred to our committee, not the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. I believe it would be referred to the Homeland Security Committee because they have Government-wide responsibility. We have no idea how much cost would be involved to each agency in compiling this information for the Office of Management and Budget. I assume it would be a substantial cost, and it is not one that I think we should act upon with this bill without any idea of that cost.

So my own preference, frankly, would be that if the Senator wishes to have a report such as this developed, the appropriate way to proceed would be to go to the chairman and ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, ask for a hearing on this proposal, get that committee to look seriously at what can be done to develop this kind of report, what cost is involved in developing this kind of report, whether there are needs that national security would require for putting some exemptions into this report so that we would not be putting on the Internet information that some of our national-security- related agencies would not want posted on the Internet. That would be the approach I would urge on my colleague.

So for all of those reasons, I oppose the amendment and urge my colleagues to oppose it when it comes to a vote.

Mr. President, I believe the Senator from Oklahoma has three additional amendments he wants to present. I believe he has 30 minutes on his side and I have less than 15 on our side. I will defer to him to go ahead, and then I will have a few minutes to respond.

Mr. President, let me speak briefly in opposition to this amendment and explain my understanding of it. This amendment prohibits the three agencies, the Department of Interior, Department of Energy, and the Forest Service, from assuming control--that is the phrasing in the amendment--over any parcel of land except through a voluntary exchange, unless the citizens of the political subdivision in which the parcel is located approve the assumption of control by referendum. Even if the assumption of control by the agency is approved by a referendum, that approval terminates at the end of 10 years, unless there is another referendum that extends it beyond 10 years.

It seems likely to me that the amendment would affect more than just the acquisition of fee title to land. It appears to include the interests in lands, such as rights of way, easements, possibly water rights, taking lands into trust for Indian tribes, and perhaps even friendly condemnations for public purposes.

As I read the amendment, since the only exception is for voluntary exchanges of property, I would think the sale of property--if one of these agencies wants to buy the land and a private landowner wants to sell the land to the agency, it would have to be approved by referendum. The amendment would give counties and communities, political subdivisions, veto authority over any Federal land ownership by these three agencies. I think it would frustrate congressional efforts to purchase or protect lands to make it virtually impossible to provide for any long-term Federal management or protection, such as is attempted in our national parks and monuments, wildlife refuges, historic sites, and wilderness areas. The amendment would adversely impact much more than land designated for conservation purposes. It would also impact Bureau of Reclamation dams, reservoirs, energy pipelines, and DOE facilities.

I think the concept of having to do another referendum every 10 years--I don't know how that would work, frankly. I don't know what would happen if you lose. Suppose the Federal Government goes ahead and acquires land through whatever means for a reservoir. At the end of the 10 years, there has to be another referendum on whether the Federal Government should maintain that land for that reservoir. If the referendum fails, I don't know what we would do with that reservoir at that point. There is not much of a private market for reservoirs. I don't know what action the Government would be expected to take at that point.

For a variety of reasons, I do not think this is a workable amendment, and it is one I urge my colleagues to oppose.

Mr. President, let me speak in opposition to this amendment as well.

This amendment would establish new restrictions for the three national heritage areas that are designated in this bill. It would prohibit the Secretary of the Interior from approving a management plan for a heritage area unless the local coordinating entity, which is usually a nonprofit group that is promoting tourism in this heritage area and developing the management plan, has provided written notification to each individual residing or owning property there.

The amendment also prohibits employees of the National Park Service or the local coordinating entity, usually the nonprofit group, from entering any private property within the heritage area without the written consent of the property owner.

The amendment, in my view, fails to understand what the designation of a heritage area means. Let me read some boilerplate language we put in every one of these national heritage area bills. It says in the bill, and we have this three times in this legislation because there are three heritage areas: Nothing in the subtitle abridges the rights of any property owner, including the right to refrain from participating in any plan, project, program or activity conducted within the heritage area. Nothing in the subtitle requires any property owner to permit public access to the land. Nothing in the title alters any duly adopted land use regulation. Nothing in the title authorizes or implies the reservation or appropriation of any water or water rights. Nothing in the title creates any liability, affects any liability under any other law of any private property owner with respect to any person injured on private property.

There is substantial confusion, I believe, about the idea that there is some great decrement of private property rights by the designation of these heritage areas.

The prohibition against employees of the National Park Service or coordinating entity from being able to enter private property without written permission of the landowner does not make sense, in my opinion. Heritage areas do not involve acquisition of Federal land. The amendment applies to any private land within large areas of the State. We have one in northern New Mexico which I was urged to try to establish--and we were able to establish it--by people who wanted to

promote tourism in northern New Mexico.

Under this language, a member of the Park Service or the coordinating entity would not be able to go to a mall or a restaurant or go to any other private property in northern New Mexico in a three-county area without written consent of the landowner.

In my view, the amendment should be defeated, and I urge my colleagues to vote against it when the time comes.

Mr. President, before we leave this amendment, I wish to make one more point. I read the language that is in the bill in each of these heritage area provisions that says there is nothing that prohibits or restricts the right of the landowner to deny access to his or her private property. That is the case under State property law in every State in the Union.

If I own a piece of property, if I am a private landowner and I don't want people coming on the land, I have the right to deny them access on my land. That includes Federal officials, surveyors, anybody I want to deny the right to come on my land. There is nothing in our legislation that in any way changes that.

Mr. President, let me speak briefly on this amendment and in opposition to this amendment as well.

The amendment provides 1 percent of all amounts made available to the Secretary of the Interior to carry out the various provisions of the legislation--that is to the 60-some odd bills that are included here-- beginning in 2008 and each fiscal year thereafter, be made available to the Director of the Park Service to dispose of assets described in the candidate asset disposition list. This is a list of structures the Park Service intends to demolish or to dispose of.

I think the description the Senator from Oklahoma made contemplated the sale of property. The truth is this is a list the Park Service keeps of buildings they no longer want to maintain. They wish to dispose of these, in the sense of destroying them, or tearing them down.

The amendment is essentially a tax on future appropriations for all of the programs in this package to pay for a specific asset disposal program of one agency within the Department of the Interior. Many of the programs authorized in this legislation have nothing to do with the National Park Service. It makes no sense, in my view, to reduce amounts appropriated for various unrelated programs and to other agencies, especially when the Park Service has never identified funding of its asset disposal program as a problem.

Each year we get a budget from the Department of Interior. They have never requested specific funds for this purpose. Instead, they use their regular construction funding to destroy property, to destroy these buildings when they determine that is a priority for them.

The amendment, of course, in my view also impinges upon the jurisdiction of the Appropriations Committee. I am not on the committee, my colleague Senator Domenici is, but we are essentially saying here that all future appropriations that relate to bills that are part of this legislation shall be taxed by 1 percent for this other purpose. That seems to me an unusual way for the Congress to begin undermining, through an authorizing bill, the appropriations that otherwise should be made by the Congress.

I urge my colleagues to oppose the legislation.

Mr. President, 2 minutes is remaining?

I gather that is in our total hour?

I am glad to yield that to my colleague.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on each of the amendments of the Senator from Oklahoma, if that is appropriate.

Mr. President, we have just now concluded the debate on these amendments. I would yield back the time unless the Senator from Oklahoma wishes to speak.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Madam President, I know the Senator from Washington, Mrs. Murray, is waiting to speak, and I will not take much time except to say Senator Domenici and I obviously had tremendously good help from our staffs. They worked long and hard to put this legislation together and get it into a form where it could be considered by the Senate.

We will seek time later this afternoon to elaborate as to the individual members of our staffs who participated and to thank them for their good work.

I will yield the floor and allow Senator Murray and Senator Cantwell to speak as provided in the unanimous consent agreement.

Mr. President, I rise today to encourage our colleagues to support the passage, hopefully later today, of the Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008, the legislation that has been on the Senate floor for the better part of a week now.

I like to think of this legislation not in isolation but as the third piece, if you will, of a series of steps that have been taken to try to stabilize our economy, to restore confidence in our economy, and to infuse liquidity into our financial system.

The first was really a series of steps taken by the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has acted in an extraordinary way, not just in monetary policy and trying to lower the Fed funds rate but also in encouraging Federal banks to act and now investment banks to take advantage of the discount money, to borrow money when they need it, for the Federal Reserve to be willing to take and swap, if you will, highly liquid Treasury securities for very illiquid mortgage-backed securities that a lot of our banks are holding in their portfolios, allowing those swaps to take place to infuse liquidity into the banking system to encourage banks to begin lending money again.

The Federal Reserve is involved, as we all know, with JPMorgan Chase to engineer their takeover of Bear Stearns to prevent it from going into bankruptcy and probably creating a domino effect that would have brought down other financial entities and maybe made a bad situation even worse.

Those are some of the things the Federal Reserve has done. The Presiding Officer is different, he is not as old as me, but I have never seen the Federal Reserve take these kinds of steps as we enter into a period with this kind of uncertainty. But that is the first series of things that has been done, needed to be done, and is being done by the Federal Reserve. I applaud their action.

The second piece is the stimulus package we voted on and debated here a month or two ago and passed. Sometimes when stimulus packages are agreed to by Congress and the President, it takes so long to debate the package that by the time the effect actually takes place, we are coming out of the recession and it can have the overstimulative effect providing inflationary pressures. In this case, I think what has happened is the Congress and the President agreed in a timely way on our stimulus package, and it will have a modest effect on our economy, probably in the second half of this year. Some have said it will raise gross domestic product by as much as 1.5 percent by the second half of the year. I think the most important thing that came out of the adoption of the stimulus package was to send a clear signal to people, taxpayers and others, businesses, that around here, when the chips are down, Democrats and Republicans, Congress and the President can still agree on a series of actions to help boost the economy, to give the economy a little bit of a jump start.

The third piece in this process is the legislation before us this week and last. I call it a housing recovery package. There are a number of elements to it that are meritorious. I wouldn't oversell this package. This by itself is not going to save the day and prevent all foreclosures and bring the housing market back overnight or within a couple of weeks or months. But it is a third of a series of steps that will be helpful. It is going to be followed within the next maybe 2 months with a handful of other steps that I will talk about in a few minutes. Let me talk about some of the elements I think are most beneficial in this housing recovery package that is before us today. The centerpiece is FHA modernization.

The Federal Housing Administration was created about 75 years ago. It was born during the Great Depression. Out of the FHA came the possibility for home ownership for a lot of people who otherwise would never have become home buyers. People wonder, where did we get the 30- year fixed rate mortgages. They were a creation of FHA, a legacy of FHA. As recently as 6, 7, 8 years ago, probably 15 to 20 percent of mortgages were guaranteed or insured by the FHA, 15 to 20 percent. Last year the number was about 5 percent. We dropped, in roughly half a dozen years, from 15 to 20 percent of home mortgages insured by FHA to last year about 5 percent.

Where did those mortgages go? Where did people go for financial help to buy a home? A lot of them went to places they should not have gone. A lot of them ended up being induced or seduced and convinced to use a different kind of a financing. They used exotic adjustable rate mortgages, some of them with no money down, no principal payments for an extended period of time. Some of these exotic adjustable rate mortgages called for very low interest, seductive teaser rates which may have been 2, 3, 4 percent at the beginning and would later go up by reset within a couple of years to be 7, 8, or 9 percent. A lot of folks ended up signing on to this deal and didn't realize there is a penalty for trying to refinance out of an adjustable rate mortgage, making it very difficult. I suppose the borrower and maybe the mortgage broker or the lending institution that was involved, everybody expected housing prices to continue to go up; they had for years. As long as housing prices continue to rise, everybody comes out of the hole. If somebody is unable to make payments, they sell the house, do it for profit and pay off their mortgage. Not many people thought about what happens if prices, instead of going up, all of a sudden come down. They have come down, and in some places they have come down a lot.

Part of our legislation is designed to encourage people to take a second look at FHA. For folks, especially first-time home buyers or people who have less than perfect credit, the FHA in the past has been their avenue to become homeowners. We wanted to make sure it is an option that is there for the 21st century.

Without getting into a whole lot of detail, let me say, of all the pieces that are part of this bill, the most important one is FHA modernization. I will mention a couple of those elements that I think are helpful. One of those takes the FHA loan limit starting at

the end of this year to $550,000. Instead of being $420,000, it takes it up to $550,000. In Delaware, you can get a perfectly good house for $420,000. In some places in New Jersey one can get a perfectly good house for $420,000. In some places in New Jersey you probably can't. A lot of places in California, Florida, Connecticut, home values are such that for $420,000, which is the FHA loan limit that will be in effect next January 1, you can buy a cottage, but if you want to think about buying a three-bedroom house with a garage and a bathroom, you can forget about buying anything close to that for $420,000. What we want to do is address the needs in high-cost housing areas so that FHA will still be relevant in those States, as well as in States that have more modest housing costs.

The second element of this bill that is good is that the bill seeks to streamline the bureaucracy of FHA. We hear a good deal about that from banks and from realtors, that the bureaucracy is inappropriate for the 21st century. We have streamlined it. We do that in the context of this legislation.

Another element that I believe is helpful is, we are going to make more available counseling assistance to people who need it as they are looking for a place to buy and to consider their options. There is a new pilot credit scoring program that will be created. It is designed to increase access to credit for borrowers who may have a history of making required payments on time but haven't established a sufficient credit rating to enable them to be considered as serious home buyers.

Those are some of the pieces of the FHA modernization portion of this bill. It is maybe the most important thing we are going to do.

A second important element of this bill deals with community development block grants. We appropriated this year around the country, I want to say, roughly $4 billion to communities, State and local governments, moneys they can use to help develop their communities. We want to make sure that some additional moneys--in this case, another roughly $4 billion--might be made available to State and local governments to help communities that have been hit hard by foreclosures and delinquencies. The money could be put to use in many communities around the country.

A third element of this bill that I believe has merit deals with housing authorities. Housing authorities currently are able to issue tax-exempt revenue bonds. The proceeds of those tax-exempt revenue bonds are used in probably every State in the country to allow people to become first-time home buyers and to realize a low interest rate. They do this with moneys raised by tax-exempt revenue bonds. The proceeds of these same bonds can be used by housing authorities to build multifamily, affordable housing as well. The proceeds of these bonds cannot be used, though, to assist in refinancing of subprime loans. With this legislation, we say you can do that, too. State and local housing authorities can use the proceeds of these tax-exempt revenue bonds. In fact, we allow them to issue another $10 billion worth and a permissible use is to help folks to refinance out of these subprime loans that they have gotten themselves into.

Another element of this bill is actually one offered by our colleague Senator Isakson from Georgia. He has been good enough to let me advise some changes in his earlier proposal. Let's use the situation here. We have 100 desks here, and we will assume for this example that these are not desks but homes in a community. Maybe there are two or three of these homes where the families have run into trouble and cannot keep up with the mortgage payments. The homes have gone into foreclosure and they are decaying, the grass is growing, the shrubbery is not cut, trash not removed. Those homes are destroyed and beginning to decay, and they bring down the value of the other homes in the community. Senator Isakson suggested that we allow a tax credit to be used for someone who will come in and buy a home in foreclosure and live there. He proposed that that person be provided by the U.S. Treasury a $5,000 tax credit. To buy a foreclosed home and to agree to live there, $5,000 for year 1, $5,000 for year 2, $5,000 for year 3, is a pretty expensive proposition. That would certainly get people's attention and encourage them to buy homes in foreclosure, but it is a serious hit on the Treasury.

I urged him--I am sure others did as well--to make the proposal a little more modest. What he has done, I think prudently, is to say, in the same situation, a home in foreclosure, to encourage people to come in and buy homes in foreclosure so they don't bring down the values of other properties, that they will get a tax credit but year 1 is $3,500 and year 2 is another $3,500; $7,000 in all as a tax credit from the Treasury to the person making that purchase. It is more modest. There is an impact on the Treasury, but it is not nearly as great as would otherwise have been the case. It is a good proposal.

Another idea in this legislation that makes a lot of sense deals with people who are in some distress--maybe they have lost their job, they have sickness in the family, they are finding it difficult to pay their bills, they are getting behind on their mortgage payments. They are not sure what to do, and sometimes they end up turning to people who take advantage of them, shysters who take advantage of them. And rather than helping them with their problems, to work their way through it, they take advantage of the distressed homeowner.

There are nonprofit entities. They work under a broad umbrella of something called the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation. The shorthand title is NeighborWorks. And the idea there is to have these nonprofits provide counseling assistance. They are not trying to take advantage of home homeowners in distress. They want to help them find the best option for themselves and their family. We provided, I think through HUD's budget, about $200 million initially. That money has been used. Under this legislation we provide about another $100 million, maybe more. I think an amendment by Senator Murray would take that up a bit higher. The idea is to make sure that when people are in trouble and they turn to someone for help, they will turn to someone who is really going to help them. This is a good proposal as well.

Senator Reed of Rhode Island has offered an amendment that has been made part of the package that seeks to address complex paper disclosure. When you buy a house, you have all these papers. You sit down with a realtor. It is pretty confusing stuff, even for people who are pretty smart. Senator Reed has come up with some suggestions that would protect a person who is going through the forms, trying to understand what they are signing on to. Without going into a lot of detail, his ideas have a great deal of merit and are part of the package and ought to be.

As to another element of the package--I say this as a veteran who served in the Navy during the Vietnam war and came back; they had to protect us--to protect others who have served in our Armed Forces since, we have something called the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act.

The idea is to try to make sure our soldiers and sailors-- particularly when they are deployed overseas--and their families are not taken advantage of. We have given them, if you will, a break in making sure they are not taken advantage of by those who are, for example, lenders who loaned money to them.

Right now, the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act--say I am deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. I come back from my year or 15-month deployment. My home cannot have been foreclosed on. My family and I live in the home, and we had a hard time making our mortgage payment. Maybe I gave up my regular civilian job and took a much lower paying job, was called up for Active Duty in the military, and I have been unable to keep up with my mortgage payments.

Under the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act, my home could not be foreclosed on for at least 3 months while I am away and for 3 months from when I come back from that deployment. This legislation would extend that by an additional 6 months. I would be protected for 9 months, my family would be protected for 9 months, after my return to, hopefully, get back on our feet to be able to meet our financial obligations.

Also, this provision provides returning soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines with 1 year of relief from increases in mortgage interest rates. Where these adjustable rate mortgages are resetting, the military personnel get an extra year.

The final part of this provision is that the Department of Defense is required to establish a counseling program to ensure veterans and active servicemembers can access assistance if they have seen financial difficulties. Again, the idea is for folks who are in distress--in this case, military personnel--who are homeowners, that they could actually get access to advice from people who have the best interests of the veterans at heart.

Those are some of the provisions, not all of the provisions. There are other provisions dealing with standard property deductions and to allow folks who do not itemize to take a standard deduction--$500 for single filers, $1,000 for joint filers. It is in this legislation.

There is an extension of net operating loss carry-back that will help some of the homebuilders who are in trouble. There were concerns raised. I think Senator Gregg raised the concern yesterday--and there are other concerns about it as well--that the cost to the Treasury is considerable. The cost over 10 years, I am told, is about $6 billion, so it is not inconsequential. But we also know among the companies that are undergoing real distress right now are those that build homes. This is designed to try to extend some relief to them.

Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho and I have offered an amendment which has been accepted by both Senator Dodd and Senator Shelby on behalf of the majority and minority sides that tries to help homeowners who are in distress in another way. A lot of people do not know in this country we have something called the Federal Home Loan Banks. There are 12 of them across the country. Together they make up the Federal Home Loan Bank system. A primary job they have is to raise money they then turn around and lend to smaller financial institutions, principally for home ownership, to make home ownership more affordable.

Delaware is in the Pittsburgh Federal Home Loan Bank region. A lot of financial institutions--banks, savings and loans--work with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh. They get loans, if you will, below market-rate loans, from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh.

But one of the requirements under Federal law is these Federal Home Loan Banks have to contribute 10 percent of their net income into an affordable housing fund. The affordable housing fund is used by local entities, local financial banks, local financial entities, banks, thrifts, in order to provide home ownership opportunities for, in a lot of cases, first-time home buyers or low-income home buyers. It is a good program. We use it a lot in my State. It is used to leverage money from State and local governments. It is used to leverage money from nonprofits, from for-profits, from banks. It is a real good thing.

The problem with this affordable housing program fund is none of the moneys in this program can be used to help subsidize or refinance-- somebody who is in one of these adjustable rate mortgages that is resetting. They need to refinance and get out of it and maybe get into a 30-year fixed rate mortgage. This is affordable housing money. It is compiled. It is built up. It is about a third of a billion dollars this year. It cannot be used to help folks refinance out of a mortgage they have no business being in. This amendment that has been accepted will allow that to take place.

My friend, Senator McCaskill of Missouri, along with Senator Kohl and myself, has offered an amendment. I understand it has been accepted, and we are grateful for that. That amendment seeks to protect folks who have taken advantage of reverse mortgages.

One of the nice things about being a homeowner with equity in your home, in a lot of cases when you reach an older age and maybe your home is paid off, you ought to be able to live off the equity of your home for the rest of your life. In some cases, people who are in that situation do not get very good advice, and they are duped into making investments with the equity of their home in ways that really do not help the homeowner trying to live off the equity of their home for the rest of their life. It helps them less than maybe someone who is a scoundrel trying to take advantage of them.

So Senator McCaskill's amendment, that Senator Kohl and I have joined in sponsoring, allows HUD to use a portion of the mortgage insurance premiums collected under this program to adequately fund counseling and disclosure activities. So the idea there is to make sure people have good advice. If you think about it, that is a theme of almost every element I have talked about in this bill. Many of the elements of this bill are designed to make sure that consumers, homeowners, purchasers have access to good advice, someone who is going to be there for them and not take advantage of them.

I said this housing recovery package is the third step so far of three steps we need to take. The first step is action by the Federal Reserve; the second step, our stimulus package; the third step is our housing recovery package; a fourth step, that I hope will follow in the next month or two--certainly before we get to the Memorial Day recess-- is when the Senate Banking Committee takes up another measure that will consider a Hope proposal, one that Senator Dodd and Congressman Frank have been working on that has a lot of merit to help people, families whose mortgage is underwater; that is, they owe more than the value of their property, find a way to get out of that situation.

The lenders, the investors, the homeowners themselves will probably take a little bit of a financial haircut, but by doing that they would be able to stay in their homes and maybe end up with a little bit of equity in their homes in the end.

A number of us--Senator Martinez and I and Senator Schumer and Senator Jack Reed--have been very much interested, along with some of our colleagues, in trying to make sure we have a strong independent regulator for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks. That ought to be part of our next package. We need to license mortgage brokers to make sure they have the kind of training and the kind of regulatory structure under which to operate, to make sure the appraisals that are written on a lot of homes are actually worth the paper on which they are written.

So there is a lot that can be done and should be done, and my hope is we will have the opportunity to take those up, have hearings as appropriate in the Banking Committee, and mark them up before the Memorial Day recess and literally have them on the Senate floor to debate by the Fourth of July. That would be good for our country, and that would be the fourth step, if you will, to help stabilize our economy, to begin to restore some confidence in our economy, especially in the housing sector of our economy, and to make sure we put some liquidity back into our financial system and our banking system where it is needed.

But the last thing, and maybe the most helpful, it would do is to clearly demonstrate to folks around this country that this place still works, that Democrats and Republicans can find common ground, work with the administration, and do what is in the best interests of our country, our citizens, and our families.

None of what is done in the legislation that is before us today is designed to reward bad behavior. For people who have been borrowers and bought homes as a speculator, where they were interested in buying it to watch the price go up, to simply flip it, flip the house, and take advantage of these exotic adjustable rate mortgages to do that, to work the system, and to look for some short-term profit, we are not interested in helping.

With all due respect, we are not interested in borrowers who have misbehaved or mortgage brokers or investors who have misbehaved. That is not what this is about. This initiative is to restore confidence in the system, liquidity in the system, and to say to people: The system-- our legislative system, our political system--still works, and it works for the interests of people who need our help.

That said, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise to speak about an amendment I have

offered with Senator Wicker from Mississippi. Our amendment is pending. It is germane. We hope to have a vote sometime soon on this amendment, if we can move past this present standstill.

I want to just put up some numbers to try to explain our situation in Louisiana. I have used this chart before. This chart is the underlying reason for the bill that we are on because these are the top 10 districts in the country, according to the official data, where these foreclosures are taking place.

As you can see, there are about 40,000 distressed properties in and around Detroit; about 10,000 in Stockton, CA; 30,000 in Las Vegas; about 51,000 in San Bernardino, CA; about 23,000 in Sacramento; about 27,000 around the Cleveland area--and it goes on. These are the top 10.

Now, this data is readily available. I am sorry I do not have more than just the top 10. But I used this chart to make my point about our situation still in Louisiana and on the gulf coast.

You can see, the percentage of households in Detroit is about 5 percent; the same with Stockton, CA, and Las Vegas is 4 percent. That is a real crisis in those areas. It seems like a small percentage, but if you are in a neighborhood where there is a concentration of these kinds of homes, the problem is--and what we are trying to solve, those of us who are supporting this bill; and I am supporting this bill--to try to provide some additional community development block grant funding because not only are we trying to perhaps come up with State- based local solutions that might help these particular families, but the real tragedy, in my mind, is those families around these homes who did absolutely nothing wrong. They took out a 30-year mortgage. They have paid their mortgage every month. They did not enter into any flimflam kind of agreement.

But the problem is, as homes collapse around them and become vacant and are foreclosed on, these homeowners who did nothing wrong, who have most of their net worth tied up in the value of their home, are seeing, through no fault of their own, their property values plummeting.

Now, if you are a young person, and you are a homeowner in this situation, you might have time to ride it out. But if you are a senior getting ready to retire, or if you are getting ready, in middle age, to send your two children to college and were hoping to refinance your home to do that and had planned for 20 years--this was your plan to send your kids to college. You did not get to go to college, but you have saved and scrimped and worked hard, and you were going to refinance your house to send your children to college. Guess what. Your kids do not go to college because your neighbor took out a subprime loan, and it is causing your property value to plummet.

Now, I know the President does not understand why community development block grant moneys are important. He does not understand a lot of things. But some of us do understand why we need to help people in these neighborhoods.

So I am just explaining that while the numbers are very high, and these percentages are startling, I want to show you what our numbers look like in Louisiana because if these look bad, ours are terrible.

It is not because we had foreclosure problems. It is not because we have subprime--in fact, our State does not really have the same problem that California and Nevada are facing. But we had our own sets of catastrophes, and that, of course, was in the storms of a few years ago, Katrina and Rita, that hit the gulf coast--both just historic in their devastation.

We are still having a housing crisis throughout the gulf coast, really from Alabama to the southern part of Texas, as people struggle with the impact of those storms. In New Orleans and Saint Bernard and in the southeastern portion of Louisiana, our situation was even further complicated when the Federal levees that should have held did not. They failed, and people who had never had an inch of water in their home had 14 feet and lost everything they had worked for their entire lives.

So in St. Bernard Parish we see not 5 percent, not 4 percent but 54 percent of the homes are empty or devastated. In Cameron, LA, not 4 percent or 5 percent but 46 percent of the homes; in Plaquemines Parish, 44 percent; in Orleans Parish, 78,000, almost 80,000, out of only 122,000. That is an extremely high percentage almost 42 percent of households that are still damaged or destroyed.

Now, what has been done to help these homeowners? Some have been able to collect their insurance, but very few people have collected all of what they thought they were due. Some have collected a modest grant we gave from this Congress of an average of $60,000. Some have received-- that is about the average for homeowners. But I would contend that a $60,000 to $75,000 to $85,000 grant and some insurance proceeds they were able to receive does not, by any means, get these homeowners back to where they need to be.

So we have tried to pass additional legislation that might help and have been unable to move anything substantial through the Housing Committee. However, we now see an opportunity on this floor on a housing bill that is attempting to reach communities that are in distress--ours is in distress for a different reason, not, as I said, because of failure to pay or because of delinquency or foreclosure. We see an opportunity, by making a very modest change in the underlying bill, to help these homeowners. This would make it clear, with the amendment I offer with Senator Wicker--our amendment would simply say that in the community development block grant portion of this bill, that it be allowed to be used not just for homes that were foreclosed but for homes that were conveyed to local land banks.

To deal with this situation, we have created in Louisiana--or are in the process of actually creating--parishwide authorities that are done at the local level; they are called land banks. They have other names for them, such as redevelopment authorities. They exist throughout the country. It is not anything new. But we are finding we may need to be supporting these kinds of land banks as properties are conveyed back to the Government--not in every case, but some people are making choices. They don't want to rebuild in that place; they would rather take their grant money and build somewhere else. That piece of property is then conveyed back to our State land bank, and our land bank is trying to move these properties back to local parish-based land banks so these neighborhoods can be redeveloped with some sort of rhyme and reason to them; so it is not hit or miss but that there is some sort of local planning. We are being required to build better and stronger and smarter. We are trying to actually live up to that challenge by being smart about the way we redevelop.

I see the ranking member of the committee on the floor, the Senator from Alabama, who is familiar, of course, with some of the devastation that occurred because some of it, unfortunately, happened in Mobile-- not to the extent it happened in the southern part of Mississippi and Louisiana. But what I am saying to the Senator from Alabama is that with one modest change that actually is germane, according to the Chair, and does not cost anything, we would simply allow our portion of whatever comes to Louisiana and Mississippi--not a dime more than what is already in the bill--to be used for land banks associated with the redevelopment of these kinds of properties. I am afraid, if we don't make this change, it might put Mississippi and Louisiana and, frankly, Alabama and parts of Texas in the position of not being able to use their community development block grants for the problem they have.

So in this whole country, some States have problem A. In other States, we have problem B. I am trying to make sure our problem is met with this amendment. It is not adding anything; it is an allowable use of our community development block grant, and it will go a long way to help.

Now, we estimate--I don't know if the Senator from Alabama has these numbers--that for our State, based on the formula that is in the bill, Louisiana may get somewhere between $90 million and $100 million, but we don't know until that formula is promulgated by the Secretary of HUD, but we estimate that based on the formulas in the bill. So we want to make sure the $90 million or $100 million can actually

be used to help these homeowners because they are technically not in foreclosure. They are in various stages of legal status, but they are not necessarily in foreclosure.

So that is the purpose of our community development block grant amendment. I would most certainly appreciate it if the leadership would take a look at it. Again, it is amendment No. 4447. It doesn't cost anything. It is scored at zero. I have a great partner in offering this amendment, the Senator from Mississippi, Mr. Wicker. So that is the community development block grant amendment.

I wish to take a moment to also talk about the mortgage revenue bonds, which is part of the financing part of this bill. As my colleagues know, this bill is basically made up of two different sections. One is a housing section and then one is a tax section. In the tax section of this bill, one of the ways the Finance Committee wants to try to alleviate some of the problems around the country is to allow the issuance of some additional mortgage revenue bonds. We have done this for years and years and years. Before I was a Senator, I was the State treasurer. I used to issue these bonds in my State. They are a very good tool to promote home ownership, which we believe in at home in Louisiana, and I am sure everyone else does as well. It gives opportunities to build affordable, low-income housing where there is a real need throughout the country, particularly now in the gulf coast.

One of the things I am very concerned about--I don't know if the Senator from Alabama or the Senator from Utah, who is on the floor, experienced this in their States, but we have a real shortage of affordable housing for seniors, as more people want to live independently, but they don't necessarily want to live in a 2,000- or 3,000-square-foot home by themselves. They would like to move somewhere closer to maybe where their family is, and they would like an affordable rental unit. Some people would like to buy a condo, but to people of a certain age bracket, a condo is not something they grew up with, so an affordable rental is a more comfortable situation for them. We can't find a lot of senior housing down in the gulf coast right now. Most everything we had was literally washed away or flooded or destroyed.

So the great thing about this particular provision coming out of Finance is these revenue bonds could be used for this kind of building. Again, the other amendment I have, No. 4404, does not have a score. Actually, it has a minor score of $3 million. It is very minor compared to the other costs of this bill. It is de minimis, a $3 million cost. What it will do is it will allow us to be able to again use our bonding authority--not anything more, not anything additional, but to use our bonding authority to address the problem we have with these properties.

I wish to show some pictures. This is a neighborhood--I am sorry I can't identify where this is, and it was some time ago. Most of this debris has been picked up throughout the gulf coast, but in many places, while the debris is gone, these structures remain as they are here: abandoned and destroyed until property owners figure out what they are going to do.

Here is another picture we have used. I am not sure, again, where this is, but houses such as this are still throughout the gulf coast area; a lot of it has been cleaned up. Maybe this home has been gutted, but it is basically down to its 2 by 4s, and it is basically sitting there in neighborhood after neighborhood. This is actually a home in St. Bernard Parish in a community called Chalmette.

I wish I had better pictures to show the blocks and blocks of devastation that still exist. When I say devastation--it is cleaned up, on many of the lots the grass is cut, but there are no homes there, there is no neighborhood there. The library is not yet back, the Post Office is not yet back, and people are still struggling to rebuild their neighborhoods.

So I am imploring the leadership handling this bill to please take a look at amendment No. 4404. Please take a look at amendment No. 4447. The cost in one case is nothing. The cost in the other is a de minimis $3 million, but it will help tremendously to make this bill, we hope will pass, applicable to the situations in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, whose people are still struggling 2\1/2\ years after this devastation.

Basically, that is the gist of my remarks. We have another amendment pending relative to the tax credit, but I will hold my remarks on that. But these two amendments we are hoping we can get included in any kind of modified package. Again, I have bipartisan support. It does not increase the cost of the bill, and it would go a great way to make sure this bill, if it does get passed--I know there is opposition in the House and I know the President is opposed to this bill, so this bill may never see the light of day. I am very clear about that. But if it does, at least let the people of Louisiana and Mississippi use the money that is being allocated to us anyway for the problem we have--not the problem everybody else has--because we simply have a different problem. I hope my colleagues would recognize our situation.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, it looks as if we are getting to the end of this debate on housing, and it has been a good one.

I come to the floor before we move to the final stages of this debate to thank my colleagues for their extraordinary help in putting into this bill, which is a major piece of legislation--attempting to help communities throughout the country deal with the added rate of foreclosures, the spiraling downward of so many neighborhoods due to a variety of different circumstances--and I think it is important that the Senate act today.

I particularly thank the chairman of this committee, Senator Dodd, for his patience and his tenacity in getting us to this point and for putting in many good provisions into this bill that will be a help to homeowners, to communities, in some instances to lenders, who got themselves into difficulty because, again, our goal is to try to reinvigorate the housing markets, to stop the slide. Particularly, in the case of Louisiana, we still have a significant housing crisis that did not start with the foreclosure crisis but started when 250,000 homes were destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

This Congress has been generous at times in helping us to try to come up with ways to deal with this unprecedented situation. I am very grateful for the amendment that was adopted overwhelmingly last week by a vote of over 70 Members of this body to say that our Road Home grants, which is what they are called in Louisiana--they are called Homeowner Assistance Grants in Mississippi--but those grants that have been provided by this Congress to help people rebuild homes that were destroyed when insurance proceeds were either not available or not enough. This is from small towns such as Waveland, MS, to very large cities such as New Orleans, LA; places such as Lake Charles, LA, to small little communities such Creole, LA, on the southwest side.

So it is affecting urban and rural places in my State. That amendment we adopted last week will be a significant help to homeowners trying to use those grants to get back into their homes. Until that amendment passed, this grant, if you will, was taxable. With the amendment we placed on the floor of the Senate, those grants will be treated as nontaxable, basically.

I wish we could get this bill to the President's desk before April 15. We are going to move it off the floor today. It has, of course, to go to the House for negotiations and eventually get to the President.

I am very hopeful this bill--generally in its current form, with, hopefully, some improvements, as it continues to move through the process--can get to the President's desk quickly because our people on the gulf coast--particularly in Louisiana, but on the gulf coast--who received help 2 years ago through community development block grants are feeling a real pinch right now because they are now paying $5,000, $10,000 or $20,000 in taxes on those grants at a time when they can least afford it.

I cannot tell you how many people stop me when I go home and say: Senator, if you could do one thing for us, please tell them we cannot pay tax on these grants we have received--which have been minimal, helpful but minimal, in their efforts to rebuild hundreds of thousands of homes.

Let me say for the record--and I am very proud of Habitat for Humanity. I am the cochair of the Habitat for Humanity caucus here. I have been on many builds throughout the country. Habitat for Humanity, which has not stopped working since the rain stopped--and I see the Senator from Connecticut on the Senate floor--and which has had thousands of volunteers every day coming to their sites in Louisiana, has only completed 162 houses--162 houses--and they are the largest homebuilder in New Orleans. We lost about 250,000 dwelling places throughout the state of Louisiana. So I am here in an uphill battle.

I appreciate my colleagues bearing with this speech over and over again, but I can only say, if your cities or your communities were as devastated as the ones I am representing, you would be here, too, trying every way you could to bring every little bit of help and big help to them.

So I am grateful that finally we got a housing bill to the floor after 2\1/2\ years. Finally, we got a very significant addition to some tax relief. I will say that in further reading of this bill, I am encouraged--the Senator from Connecticut is here--that the $140 million to $150 million in extra mortgage revenue bonds that will come to our State will be a help. I think in further reading of the bill, the underlying bill actually will work for us. So I am very pleased.

I think we will continue to work on the $95 million to $100 million that will come to our State in the underlying bill to help land banks. We are establishing and have established NORA in New Orleans and other land banks, perhaps in St. Bernard, Cameron, Lake Charles, perhaps in Plaquemines, perhaps in St. Tammany and Jefferson Parishes, which are the hardest hit parishes. I think this bill allows for support of those land banks. So that is another $95 million to $100 million that may come for that purpose, and we have been looking for some help in that regard.

So, overall, this bill will address many issues in Louisiana with the additional help we have received through these amendments. I am very pleased that we have made progress.

Again, I wish to thank the Senator. He has been more than generous with his time. I know this has been difficult because there are 50 of us who are asking him for special help and attention. But he has been down to our State. I am hoping he will come back and walk through some of these neighborhoods.

Finally, I will say that this is quite an interesting and wonderful-- if you can say that--experiment going on in the United States of America, because the question is, when a community of 60,000 people is wholly destroyed, which happened in St. Bernard Parish, the parish south of New Orleans, is it possible for the Government to rebuild it? If so, how and how quickly and how well? There are nonprofits and there are universities, from Harvard University to Stanford to LSU to some of the top social scientists in the country right there on the gulf coast, because in their minds, in this century, there has not been a devastation like this in modern times.

So there are some interesting questions: How does a neighborhood come back? Do you build the churches first or the schools or the libraries? How important is water and electricity relative to the scheme of things in terms of rebuilding neighborhoods? How do you do it with community planning in a democracy where every neighbor's voice has to be treated the same? So these are some exciting times. We are just making the best of a very desperate situation and trying to do the best we can to rebuild our communities.

I want to end with thanking all of the volunteers, all of the nonprofits, all of the businesses that have stepped up. I thank the Senate for acting on at least a very significant portion of this

tax relief for homeowners who are still putting the pieces of their lives and their fortunes back together--regardless of how modest some of those fortunes may be--neighborhood to neighborhood. But people are really trying to put their homes and their lives back together. So I thank the Senator from Connecticut.

I understand we are going to move now to the managers' package. Again, we have some significant portions taken care of in this bill. I am looking forward to being able to let the State know that another $140 million, $150 million worth of mortgage revenue bonds that I personally hope will go to affordable, low-income housing, workforce housing, and particularly for seniors who have been so devastated by the loss of their homes, and again, the support that may come out of this bill for our land banks as we think of new and innovative ways to get this property back on the private rolls, redeveloped in a way that creates excitement and vibrancy in neighborhoods from New Orleans East to Lakeview to the Lower Ninth Ward, all the way to lower Packwood Parish, which is about as far south as you can go in Louisiana.

I thank the Senator from Connecticut, and I yield the floor.