Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

It is my great pleasure to take the time today to congratulate the Tampa Bay Lightning for winning the 2004 National Hockey League Stanley Cup championship and to salute them for their outstanding performance throughout the season.

Though only in the league for 12 seasons, the Lightning have quickly ascended to the pinnacle of their sport and won the hearts not only of their hometown fans in Tampa Bay but of fans all over the world. Tampa Bay fans respect that the team plays hockey the way it is supposed to be played, with hard work, discipline, and teamwork.

Special mention must be made of team captain Dave Andreychuk. After playing in one of the roughest professional leagues in the world for 21 years, retiring must have seemed the logical step to take. Instead, this true team leader rejoined his teammates for an outstanding 22nd season.

It is not always the case in sports that the most deserving team wins. Fortunately, the Lightning of Tampa Bay have been awarded the Stanley Cup for their valiant play. The Tampa area is famous for its scorching lightning and the Tampa community sure hopes this Lightning will strike twice.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the good gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis), the author of the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, many of us looked in awe as former President George Herbert Walker Bush parachuted from a plane yesterday to celebrate his 80th birthday. Today I am pleased to join my colleagues to celebrate the entire life of our former President on his 80th birthday.

Born into a family known for its tradition of public service and having served his country in many important posts, George Bush enlisted in the armed services at the age of 18. The youngest pilot in the Navy when he earned his wings, George Bush flew 58 combat missions during World War II. So we can see the former President was only continuing what he had first done as a young pilot when he parachuted from that plane yesterday.

After being shot down during a mission in the Pacific, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery in action. As President, George H.W. Bush presided over the Nation through major events in our history. These events included the dissolution of the Soviet Union; the tearing down of the Berlin Wall; and the first war with Iraq, Operation Desert Storm. Through all of these events, President Bush served his country with remarkable dedication.

Today it is my privilege to thank him for his hard work for our country and to wish him a happy 80th birthday.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to the 29th Annual Capital Pride Festival, a celebration of the National Capital Area's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) communities, their families and friends.

Since its beginning in 1975, the Capital Pride Festival has grown from a small block party to a seven-day series of events. This year, the Pride Parade will be held on June 12th and will culminate in a Street Festival on Pennsylvania Avenue, attended by people of all backgrounds from the District and the region. To emphasize the universality of human rights and the importance of enacting congressional bills addressed to the human rights of the GLBT community, I have marched in the Pride parades since coming to Congress. I have seen the festival and parade grow bigger and better each year and with it the spread of support of equal rights for this community.

Mr. Speaker, longtime resident of the District of Columbia Benjamin F. Wilson is the immediate past chairman of the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics who served as a member of the Board since June 29, 1990 and as its Chairman from October 1, 1991 until May 24, 2004 having been appointed by three different Mayors of the District of Columbia.

The District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics, a Charter independent agency, comprised of a three-member Board who are unpaid volunteers charged to carry out the agency's mission. The mission of the Board is to enfranchise eligible residents, conduct elections, and assure the integrity of the electoral process.

Since the Board's inception in 1955, he is the first chairman to serve continuously for a period of fourteen years without interruption in his service providing exceptional public service to the citizens of the District of Columbia. He is the longest serving Chairman of the Board in its 49 year history.

Mr. Wilson is to be commended for leading the Board while it carried out its mission of administering the electoral process which requires wisdom, courage, and the desire to remain focused on its vision of conducting free and impartial elections conducted in a fair, efficient, and accurate manner.

He has maintained the highest level of integrity in performing the duties of the Board displaying courage and stamina while protecting the public's interest from manipulation for personal or partisan gain respecting the rights of all and maintaining the highest level of integrity.

He has taken to heart the Board's mandate to administer an impartial electoral process for the citizens of the District of Columbia both in the conduct of elections and his commitment to assuring the integrity of our election system in the Board's role as the gatekeepers of Democracy.

Mr. Wilson has been at the forefront of the core of the Board's mission which is voter education, registration, and electoral advancement in the areas of support and technology. He has served on the Board while addressing

issues such as the right of homeless individuals to gain and maintain access to the franchise, developing the process for compliance with the National Voter Registration Act, Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, the support of the right of college students to register and vote, and the Help America Vote Act.

During his long tenure on the Board, he has led the expansion of voting precincts to provide greater voter accessibility for disabled and elderly voters leading the District of Columbia to be the first major jurisdiction in the United States to provide dual voting systems in the polling place allowing blind and other disabled voters to vote in privacy and secrecy without assistance.

He has also led the Office of Campaign Finance to successfully revive and stabilize programs which were formerly dormant and addressed a backlog of cases that existed at the time of his first appointment as Chairman regarding investigative matters.

He has insisted on education for voters, candidates, and the public at-large regarding campaign finance and conflict of interest laws and on imposing and collecting fines to enforce the ethics laws in the District of Columbia.

Mr. Wilson has done outstanding work at the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics, sometimes under trying conditions. For example, the Board conducted a flawless election with new voting machines that had never been used before when the two leading candidates for Mayor of the city were write-in candidates. He successfully led the Board and its staff during an extremely difficult period.

In addition to his service on the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics, Mr. Wilson has actively served the community by serving as the former Chairman of the Board of Directors of Healthy Babies, Incorporated; former Co-Chairman of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law; former Chairman of the Board of the Dwight Mosley Foundation; and former Chairman of the Advisory Board of WAMU public radio.

I commend Mr. Wilson for his volunteer public service to the citizens of the District of Columbia.

Mr. Speaker, today I am pleased to introduce the Equal Surety Bond Opportunity Act (ESBOA). The ESBOA will help qualified women and minority-owned businesses to compete in the contracting business by helping them obtain adequate surety bonding. In addition, the ESBOA is directed against barriers that many qualified small and emerging construction firms encounter in obtaining surety bonding. I have introduced this bill before. I do so again because it is a common sense way to eliminate a serious form of discrimination without an additional enforcing bureaucracy.

A surety bond is issued by insurers for the purpose of guaranteeing that should a bonded contractor default, a construction project will be completed and the contractors employees and material suppliers will be paid. Surety bonding is mandatory for competing for all Federal construction work in excess of $25,000, all federally assisted construction projects in excess of $100,000, and most state and local public construction. However, surety bonding requirements are not restricted to government contracting. Increasingly, private construction contracts also require surety bonding. As surety bonding has become a widespread requirement, the inability to obtain surety bonding can cripple a construction firm, especially a small or a new one.

In 1992, Congress acknowledged the importance of this issue when it enacted the Small Business Credit Crunch Relief Act and included legislation to study the problem of discrimination in the surety bonding field, Public Law 102-366, that I had introduced. The survey provision required the General Accounting Office (GAO) to conduct a comprehensive survey of business firms, especially those owned by women and minorities, to determine their experiences in obtaining surety bonding from corporate surety firms.

The GAO completed the requested survey in June 1995. The survey found that of the 12,000 small construction firms surveyed, 77 percent had never obtained bonds. In addition, minority and women-owned firms were more likely to be asked for certain types of financial documentation. Further, minority-owned firms were also more likely to be asked to provide collateral and to meet additional conditions not required by others.

The ESBOA bill I am introducing today is modeled on the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in credit practices. The ESBOA requires the contractor notify the applicant of the action taken on his or her application within 20 days of receipt of a completed bond application. If the applicant is denied bonding, the surety would also be required, upon request, to provide a written statement of specific reasons for each denied request. Furthermore, the bill would provide civil liability in the form of damages and appropriate equitable relief should a surety company fail to comply with this notice requirement.

This legislation would help all contractors to have a better understanding of the reasons behind the denial of their bond applications. Furthermore, the importance of civil penalties cannot be understated for minority applicants who currently have no recourse when they suspect that the denial of surety bonding was based on considerations such as gender, race or religion.

The disclosure of pertinent information to rejected applicants is an equitable principle familiar throughout the federal acquisition process. This is the case when a small business is turned down for a government contract and has the opportunity to demand a negative pre- award survey. With this information, the business can contest the award or use the information to be better prepared for the next award competition. The more a business knows about what is wrong with its proposal, the greater the likelihood that the next time the business will submit a better and more competitive proposal.

According to the National Association of Minority Contractors (NAMC), many minority contractors reported being turned down for a bond without an explanation. When explanations are not proffered, a perception of discrimination in the surety industry is created. This perception drives minority contractors to obtain sureties outside the mainstream, often at significant additional expense and fewer protections, placing themselves, their subcontractors, and the Government at greater risk.

Civil penalties in this bill are necessary to compel surety bond companies to provide accurate and non-discriminatory reasons for denial of surety bonding. This bill will provide the applicant with the necessary civil remedy should the surety bonding company refuse to provide this important information. In addition to providing essential information for future bond applications, a clear response will identify whether surety bonding companies are using discriminatory or fallacious criteria in making these decisions.

This legislation will create an environment in which small business firms, particularly those owned and controlled by minorities and women, can successfully obtain adequate surety bonding. This legislation will enable us to ferret out continuing biases in the industry. I urge my colleagues to support this bill and help abolish the artificial impediments to the development and survival of emerging small businesses.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to address provisions contained in section 2841 of H.R. 4200 that authorizes a transfer of 38 acres in the District of Columbia from the Department of Navy to the General Services Administration for the purpose of housing the Department of Homeland Security at the Navy Complex on Nebraska Ave.

First let me say I support the commitment of the Department of Homeland Security to remain in the District of Columbia and commend Secretary Ridge for his personal involvement in this decision. Since the Department was created two years ago I have worked with both the Department and the General Services Administration to identify suitable space in the District to house the new department, and am delighted that for now and until the Transportation Committee reviews and approves its housing plans, they will be housed at the Naval Complex on Nebraska Ave.

However, I do have objections, and these are bi-partisan objections shared with my colleagues on the Transportation Committee, about authority contained in section 2841 that transfers the Naval property into the GSA inventory.

Section 2841 transfers the property to the General Services Administration using the phrase ``administrative jurisdiction,'' rather than the more traditional and routinely used phrase ``custody and control.''

Mr. Chairman, by way of background, officials from the White House, Office of Management and Budget, The Department of Homeland Security, General Services Administration and the Navy agreed to a three step approach whereby: (1) the Nebraska Ave. Complex would be transferred to GSA; (2) GSA would lease the space to Homeland Security; and (3) the Navy would be made whole for the expenses associated with its move from the site. In fact in February of this year these officials met with Transportation Committee staff, on a bi-partisan basis, to review the details of this approach.

This provision reflects that approach, except that the property should be transferred to the full custody and control of the Administrator of GSA. The reason for this change is quite simple. According to GSA's lawyers, administrative jurisdiction is undefined and thus open to interpretation regarding the bundle of rights and responsibilities associated with use and ownership of property in the GSA inventory. Such uncertainties associated with the transfer of responsibility for property inevitably lead to delays based on different legal interpretations and often to litigation.

For example, the ability of GSA to operate, maintain, and protect buildings is for buildings under the custody and control of the Administrator, but the ability to perform these activities is unclear for facilities under administrative jurisdiction. Further, the ability to assign and reassign space is for those buildings under the custody and control of the Administrator, but it is unclear that the Administrator would preserve the complex for federal purposes under ``administrate jurisdiction.'' Finally, the application of NEPA and historic preservation provisions are unambiguous for buildings under the custody and control of the Administrator but would not apply for buildings under the administrative jurisdiction.

Needless to say, a simple remedy of inserting ``custody and control'' will clarify any use or ownership circumstances that could affect these 38 valuable acres in my District.

My staff has been working with staff from the House Armed Services Committee on a freestanding bill that will make this section obsolete. On a bi-partisan basis, we believe there is a way to deal with this issue. Once we reach agreement on appropriate and legally sufficient language we hope this agreement will be reflected in the DOD conference report.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for the work he has done on this bill and the work to point out the real problems with this bill.

I must tell my colleagues, I would be in the corner of those who want to control the regulatory process. I chaired the EEOC, completely reformed the agency to reduce regulations, and one of the reasons I am for controlling the regulatory process is because overregulation makes people hate government. I do not hate government. I think government does many good things.

I come to the floor to tell my colleagues one of the reasons why I oppose this bill. During hearings we discussed so-called regulatory budgeting. That is not defined in this bill, as it should be, but it was clear during the hearings that the point was to set a limit on the total costs of regulations. This limit is based on the gross costs, not the net costs, which would account for benefits from social legislation or regulations.

For example, we have seen lead in the water in D.C., and now we think it is all over the United States. Who would not believe that in trying to control lead in the water, even if it proved costly, we would not know more if we knew what the benefits were.

Assuming we could ascertain that, let us look at how inconsistent my good friends on the other side of the aisle are.

When it comes to tax cuts, they insist upon something called dynamic scoring. I know of no reputable economist who believes in dynamic scoring, but they say what we should count are the benefits from the tax cuts as well as the expenditures or the costs to the government. Well, if this is the case with tax cuts, why are we not counting the benefits of regulations as well as their costs to get a fair estimate? That is only one of the problems with this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman of the full committee for his generosity, and I thank him for his leadership, and I thank the ranking member, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) as well for his leadership on this important issue. I also thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne) for his leadership on education issues in our Congress.

I think it is fair to say that the Brown decision is the most important court decision in American history. The decision saved our country from catastrophic racial division that could have come to race war rather than to a nonviolent revolution led by Dr. Martin Luther King that began with the peaceful overthrow of legal discrimination with Brown v. Board of Education.

Most shamefully, our country tolerated segregated schools here in the Nation's Capital as well. I attended those segregated schools. We pay tribute and I offer my personal thanks to the plaintiffs in Bolden v. Sharp, the decision which was one of the cases that went to the Supreme Court grouped together under Brown v. Board of Education.

But, Mr. Speaker, Brown is much larger than school desegregation, as large a mission as that decision took on. After Brown, public funding of segregated policies or programs became constitutionally untenable. Brown did more than we had the right to expect from any one court decision, but Brown could not prevent resegregation through white flight, or discriminatory housing. Brown could not fund our Nation's schools. And Brown cannot raise test scores of children.

On this 50th anniversary, let us remember that Brown did its job, and it left the Congress and the American people with work still to do.

Mr. Speaker, on May 17, 2004, the Library of Congress will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education. This celebration will include an exhibit as well as a panel discussion on school integration. In conjunction with this celebration the Library's Leadership Development Program class of 2003-2004 sponsored a poster contest in the District of Columbia Public Schools. Children in three grade categories, grades 3-4, 5-6, and 7-8, were asked to submit posters which expressed the theme, ``How has the case changed our schools?'' The three winners of the poster contest are: Maria Oliva, age 9, Shepherd Elementary School, Teacher: Dee Dee Chambliss; Canaisha Vaughn, age 11, Hamilton Center, Teacher: Leslie Milofsky; and Nathan Johnson, age 13, Kramer Middle School, Teacher: Mary Jackson.

Congratulations to these three winners and to all students who participated in celebrating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Mr. Speaker, today, I am pleased to introduce a bill to prevent the District of Columbia from becoming a test case for the privatization of Medicare. A Medicare comparative cost demonstration project under part C of Title XVIII of the Social Security Act was a part of the new Medicare prescription drug law. My bill is one of several introduced by members of Congress designed to prevent the federal government from making a particular district one of the six testing grounds for the entire country.

The Medicare prescription drug legislation, signed into law on December 8, 2003, contained a little-noticed but crucial provision designed to lead to the privatization of Medicare. Section 214(a) of the Medicare bill established up to six ``premium support'' demonstration projects starting in 2010. These demonstration projects will provide health care vouchers for private insurance to eligible Medicare beneficiaries. As a result, Medicare will compete directly against private plans in offering services to older Americans.

I strongly oppose the voucher approach because seniors who choose to remain or must remain in the traditional fee-for-service plan will pay significantly higher premiums than they pay now. The private plans will be able to cherry pick the healthiest and youngest seniors to enroll in their plans while turning away older, sicker people. Traditional Medicare, therefore, will have very high costs and premiums because it will not be able to spread the burden over the larger and most diverse pool of seniors. This ``competition'' proposal is stacked to portray Medicare as inefficient and expensive in order to give the program's critics the manufactured evidence to get the privatization result they want from a premium pool of cherry picked seniors.

The Medicare law did not specify where the demonstration projects will take place, but said they will be in 6 metropolitan statistical areas to be determined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This experiment is the result of a compromise that was necessary to keep the privatized vouchers from going nationwide immediately. The determination to privatize Medicare and Social Security remains a goal of the Republican Congress and of President Bush, however. Like others who have filed similar bills, my bill says count the District of Columbia out.

Mr. Speaker, this bill has an unusual origin. The Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, for himself and the members of the trial court, visited my office to request that the annex under construction for the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Building be named for senior U.S. District Court Judge William B. Bryant. Judge Bryant was unaware of the desires and actions of his colleagues, who unanimously agreed to request that the annex be named for the judge. It is rare that Congress names a courthouse or an annex for a judge who has served in that court and even more rare for a judge who is still sitting. Judge Bryant's colleagues, who know his work and his temperament best, have found a particularly appropriate way for our city and our country to celebrate the life and accomplishments of a great judge. I know Judge Bryant personally, I know his reputation in this city and on the law, I know that the request to name the annex for Judge Bryant reflects deep respect for his unusually distinguished life at the bar.

Judge Bryant began his career in private practice in the segregated Washington of the 1940s and 50s, when African-American lawyers were barred from membership in the District of Columbia Bar Association and from using the Bar law library. He established his legal reputation as a partner in the legendary African-American law firm of Houston, Bryant and Gardner and taught at Howard University Law School. His reputation as an extraordinary trial lawyer led to his appointment as the first African-American Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. He rose to become the first African-American to serve as Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court whose members now ask that the annex be named for Judge Bryant.

For his representation of criminal defendants in private practice, Judge Bryant was admired as one of the city's best and most respected lawyers. Among his many notable cases is the landmark Mallory v. United States, 354 U.S. 449 (1957), where the Supreme Court ruled that an arrested person must be promptly brought before a judicial officer.

Judge Bryant graduated from D.C. public schools, Howard University and Howard Law School, where he was first in his class. After graduation, Judge Bryant served as chief research assistant to Dr. Ralphe Bunche when Bunche worked with Gunnar Myrdal, the famous Swedish economist, in his studies of American racial issues. Judge Bryant served in the U.S. Army during World War II and was honorably discharged as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1947.

Judge Bryant, who is 92, took senior status in 1982. He raised a family but, as Chief Judge Thomas Hogan wrote, ``lost his beloved wife, Astaire and now lives alone--with this Court and the law as the center of his life.''

I am grateful to our judges of the U.S. District Court here for the thoughtful proposal that the annex to their court be named for Judge William B. Bryant. The residents of this city that Judge Bryant has served so well and the members of the bar here would be particularly pleased. I am delighted that Senator Patrick Leahy, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has agreed to sponsor this bill in the Senate and I urge rapid approval to give honor to one of the great judges of our court.

Mr. Speaker, today I am introducing the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site Boundary Adjustment Act. This is the original home of the National Council of Negro Women founded by the great Mary McLeod Bethune. Ms. Bethune is also the legendary founder of the historically black college, Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls, now Bethune-Cookman College, and she played a powerful role in the Roosevelt Administration.

The Bethune Council House, declared a National Historic Site by Congress in 1982, was acquired by the National Park Service (NPS) in 1994. The Bethune Council House, a historic house museum, features original furniture, photographs and facsimiles of historic documents from the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). This legislation is needed for two reasons. First, the Bethune House is not handicap accessible, and as a historic building, it would be impossible to alter the house in any way without endangering its historic nature. This bill would extend the current boundary of the Bethune House by authorizing the NPS to acquire the abutting property to allow handicapped accessibility. Second, the bill provides space for administrative offices for the NPS to conduct duties related to the Bethune Council House.

This legislation is needed to carry out the important mission of the Bethune Council House. The Bethune legacy is carried forward today by the nation's most prominent civil rights leader, Dr. Dorothy Height, Chair and President Emerita of the NCNW, who recently received the Congressional Gold Medal of here in the Congress. Consequently, this bill honors both of these heroes of our country by assuring that the first home of the organization to which they dedicated their lives is accessible to all Americans. I ask that the House pass this bill promptly.

Mr. Speaker, today, for the first time, I am not alone in introducing a bill for a federal contribution to address the District's structural imbalance. I am grateful to my Republican and Democratic colleagues who, in generously joining me today, have made this the first structural imbalance bill to have critical bipartisan regional support. Their sponsorship is particularly valuable because these are the members of Congress who know the District best because they are from the region--Government Reform Chair Tom Davis, Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Frank Wolf, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Elijah Cummings and Representatives Jim Moran, Chris Van Hollen, and Albert Wynn. Montgomery County Council Executive Doug Duncan has authorized me to say that he supports the bill as well. These Members recognize the importance of federal support to compensate the District for federally imposed requirements in order to forestall another fiscal crisis in the nation's capital, while the District itself continues on the path of improvement of its finances and services that the Congress has acknowledged.

This bill ranks as one of the most important I have introduced during my seven terms in Congress. Because of its significance, I have delayed introducing other bills this year until I achieved bipartisan support in order to make the Fair Federal Compensation Act my first bill of 2004. Without this bill, the long-term viability of the District of Columbia is at risk. This risk arises from a structural imbalance caused by expenditures rising faster than revenues. Notwithstanding this dangerous situation, the District is able to balance its budget every year and avoid operating deficits by maintaining tax rates and debt that are among the highest in the nation. District of Columbia Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi has issued forecasts that show that in the out years, the structural deficit will overtake the city's diminished and inadequate tax base, not because of overspending by the D.C. government but because of the cost of federal requirements and statutes imposed on the District.

Today's bill is different from structural imbalance bills I have introduced in the past. This bill has as its predicate a May 2003 Government Accounting Office (GAO) report, which made three major findings--the first concerning the size of the imbalance, the second concerning its federal origin, and the third regarding the unavailability of options internal to the D.C. government.

First, the GAO confirmed that the District has a structural imbalance that it found is between $470,000,000 and $1,100,000,000 annually, the first determination that is based on a precise methodology for valuing, documenting and calculating the imbalance. This congressional report confines two prior privately commissioned reports that arrived at similar conclusions, a 2002 McKenzie study commissioned by the Federal City Council (an organization of regional and local business leaders) and a Brookings Institution study under the leadership of former Congressional Budget Office Director, Alice Rivlin, who also served as a chair of the former D.C. Control Board (Financial Management and Assistance Authority).

The GAO's second finding was that D.C.'s structural imbalance is caused by federal mandates and is therefore beyond the reach of D.C. government officials and taxpayers. The federal government retains 42 percent of real property, the most valuable in the city, for its own use; requires the city alone to provide costly state services, such as special education, although the District is not a state and lacks a broad state tax base; requires the District to provide services to more than 200,000 federal employees, who earn 66 percent of the income produced here; and prohibits taxation of federal workers to help pay for these services. These costs to the city trace directly to the federal government and only the federal government.

The GAO's third finding is that the only two options available to the District government are raising taxes and cutting services, each of which the GAO said it could not recommend. Rather, the options are to ``change Federal procedures and expand the District's tax base or provide additional financial support and a

greater role by the Federal government to help the District maintain fiscal balance,'' according to the GAO.

The bill I introduce today is based on these three GAO findings. The bill offsets part, though not all, of the annual structural imbalance, by providing for an annual federal contribution of $800 million. These funds are to be deposited into a D.C. infrastructure support fund that cannot be used for operating expenses but only for the specifically stated infrastructure purposes.

The bill removes some of the harm to the District's investment bond rating and the resulting high interest payments by requiring that federal contribution funds go only to the District Infrastructure Fund to be used exclusively for infrastructure and for debt service, most of which is debt from infrastructure costs. The focus on infrastructure is deliberate because the District's infrastructure is used by the entire region, where 80% of the vehicles originate and includes Metro, used overwhelmingly by regional residents. Regional complaints about the District's roads, bridges and tunnels are justified, but there is no reasonable hope of repair and maintenance if the District's taxpayer- raised budget is the only source. The focus on debt service is calculated to reduce the District's debt, the highest per capita in the country. With some relief from the structural imbalance through a federal contribution, the District will gradually be able not only to reduce its debt but also to lower the high tax rates that the imbalance forces on D.C. residents and businesses. This bill also takes into account past federal contribution failures. This bill does not allow the contribution to wither away by a failure to increase gradually with inflation but provides for annual increases tied to the Consumer Price Index.

In 1995 Congress came to grips with the reality that a city whose structure assumes it is a state although it lacks a broad tax base can no longer be responsible for the full set of costs shouldered by states. However, Congress relieved the District of the cost of some but not all state functions and left the unique federal structural impediments described in the GAO report. The District has made remarkable progress by maintaining balanced budgets and surpluses every year despite adverse national economic conditions and by improving city services. It would be tragic for Congress to allow this progress to be retracted because of uncompensated federal burdens. This bill allows the District to avoid great risks and to continue to build fiscal strength.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time and for his work in bringing this bill forward and the gentleman on the other side as well.

I strongly support this resolution. The first Federal bill for charter schools was a bill for the District of Columbia only. I worked with Newt Gingrich on this bill when he was Speaker and when he knew that the District of Columbia opposed vouchers. Instead, he worked with me on a charter school bill, and charter schools took off in the District of Columbia as they have in no other jurisdiction today.

The District of Columbia has the largest number of charter schools. I could not be more proud of these schools. They are an alternative public school system. They are accountable to us in the same way that the District of Columbia public schools are.

This morning in the other body in the Senate, a hearing was held on charter schools in our city as a part of the D.C. appropriation. The interesting thing about the voucher fight that took place just a few months ago is that my own constituents who came in to see me, who wanted vouchers, many of them said to me that the reason that they were supporting a voucher bill is that there was such a long line of backlog in the charter schools that they did not believe their children could get into the charter schools.

I then begged the Congress to give any extra money it had to our charter schools since our council had passed a bill in favor of charter schools, our council was giving money to charter schools; and, instead, the Congress decided to make the District of Columbia the only jurisdiction in the United States to have vouchers imposed on it while the Congress itself has refused to impose private school vouchers on the country.

I invite the Congress to visit the charter schools of the District of Columbia and come see what a public school system can do in addressing the need for alternatives to public schools, as I believe there are. There are people who oppose charter schools. I think that is an unacceptable position. If, in fact, the public school the child attends is not satisfactory to that parent, there should be a public school alternative for that parent. That is exactly what the District of Columbia has. A series of public school alternatives, side by side, are our public schools.

I am proud of Arts and Technology, SEED, Friendship Edison, Cesar Chavez, Carlos Rosario, Tree of Life, Capital City, Howard Road, and KIPP to name just a few of the charter schools in the District of Columbia. We have almost 1,400 youngsters attending D.C. charter schools. The next time my colleagues want a voucher, if they come and see the charter schools in the District, they will get cured of that disease.

Mr. Speaker, there may be differences on this bill, but the issue I want to raise is one I am pleased to say there are no differences on.

I appreciate this debate and the country appreciates it. I have already raised the matter with the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner). I appreciate the way in which he received the fact that the District of Columbia and the four territories are technically not included in this bill because it authorizes the States to hold a special election.

I come to the floor only before the local press and the national press raise it with me. The District of Columbia, of course, is likely to be a preeminent target. The other territories might well be. It might be easier to get to them than to us. I can understand how such an oversight would occur because we do not have the vote on the floor. We all have the vote in committee.

In any case, I know the House would want everybody to be represented in case there was a catastrophe of any kind, and I want to give my thanks once again to the chairman, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) for receiving this issue which he has assured me will be corrected.

I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time.