Advocate Summary

Issue:  Water Infrastructure & State Revolving Funds
Advocate:  National Society of Professional Engineers – Larry Bory
Date of Interview: 5/23/02

Basic Background
One is the Clean and Safe Water Infrastructure funding bill, Water Finance Act of 2002, which is slightly different in the House and Senate versions.  One of the ways that organizations work is in coalitions with large groups.  We were one of the charter members of the WIN coalition, the Water Infrastructure Network, which started three years ago now.  
Basically, the idea there is we've got a situation in our country where the Clean Water Act, it's the thirtieth anniversary of the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act followed shortly after that.  These were primarily regulatory driven acts.  In other words, they were aimed at cleaning up pollution and providing standards for water, both as its treated source and treated for drinking water and as it's treated and discharged into the lakes and rivers and oceans of the United States, or in underground sources.  Since 1972, hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested in infrastructure for wastewater and drinking water treatment to meet these standards, federal standards.  
In 1986, the original Clean Water Program was converted from a grant program, which in our judgement became extremely bureaucratic, caused the expanded cost to facilities, required a great deal of time over what was locally funded.  It was probably very inefficient in terms of the results, although it eventually produced – we probably hit the best water improvement record, cleanup record, in the world.  That hundreds of billions of dollars was very well spent.  The environment became a very significant issue.  
Many of those facilities are now reaching the end of their life, their design life.  Many others were actually installed years before and what was upgraded with the treatment capability was the pipes and pumps of the basic collection and distribution infrastructure as well as the treatment capability.  It's reaching a point where it's increasingly difficult to maintain it.  As a matter of fact, in my county, Arlington County, which is the next county over, I've noticed recently that the county is undertaking a process of relining – most of the treatment pipes are concrete and they're laid in the ground, the gravity flow.  What they're doing is they're lining them with a vinyl to cut leaks.  There's a variety of ways that things can be perpetuated in terms of the value.  But a lot of communities are reaching the point where their bonding capability, their ability to finance these things locally, is running out.

Prior Activity on the Issue 
Our issue is increasingly, this is an ad we ran recently as part of the coalition.  The key thing is to get the federal government to be a more equal partner with the states and local governments in terms of cost of financing these capital costs.  As a result, the federal government contributes less than $2 billion a year to the cost but sets all the standards.  So what we're saying is there's a gap, and I can give you a copy of the study we helped put together, there's a gap of roughly $57 billion a year in water and wastewater infrastructure.  We said that the federal government, if it's going to continue to set the standards, ought to help underwrite the cost of replacement and renovation and upgrading of these facilities as the standards change.  
A very good example of this.  The last year of the Clinton Administration, there was an ongoing study about arsenic in the drinking water.  Arsenic is a proven carcinogen and obviously in large enough quantities is a toxic substance, is a poison.  It's a heavy metal, it occurs naturally in many rock strata, especially in the West but there are other places in the country as well where the drinking water is taken from wells.  Sometimes it leaches into surface water as well.  There was a standard that had been adopted a long time ago of fifty parts per billion as a safe standard.  
In the Clinton Administration, after many years of study, they came up with a number that said ten per billion is more reasonable.  There were many small drinking water systems that said there's no way we can do that.  Let me give you one example of a community, and the reason we know about this is that one of our members is the mayor.  Everybody knows about Peoria, Illinois, there's a Peoria, Arizona, which is a small city east of Phoenix, about 120,000 people, it's a bedroom community, largely middle class.  The mayor told us that implementing the ten parts per billion standard in Peoria was going to cost the city $8 million.  This is for 120,000 people, it's a well-run city.  They were going to have to take some wells out of production, they were going to have to upgrade their treatment capabilities.  Peoria probably can handle it.  There are many smaller communities where forget it, they just wouldn't have the wherewithal to do this.
Another example is Miami-Dade County has been upgrading their sewage treatment, partly to protect the Everglades and the ocean and so on.  There are a lot of suburban communities that they brought into a big metropolitan sewage authority.  Some of these were older communities, subdivisions where the systems hadn't been put down very carefully.  It's also very swampy land so they get intrusion into it.  So they started a major billion-dollar program to upgrade their wastewater treatment system, improve the pipes and pumps, collection system.  As a result, 40 cents of every dollar in the water rates in Dade County is debt service.  They just can't go any further.  They've got a lot of poor people for whom the water rates are one of the highest things they pay.  
So here's a classic federalism issue.  Federal government sets the standards, local and state government are stuck with the bill.  It's an unfunded mandate kind of issue.  But it's also a question of capital budgeting.  The United States government is the only government in the United States that does not distinguish between operating and capital costs.  So people are depending on what's called the state revolving loan fund, which was created in 1986 to replace the grants program.  People are relying on this at the state level to plan how much money – there just isn't enough money based on the demand.
So we and about forty other organizations, we were very instrumental in creating the SRF back in 1986, with the idea that this money would become like a trust fund, that as it was loaned out and repaid at very often subsidized interest rates, below national bond rates, more localities could participate in it.  The only problem was the federal government didn't keep its promise in terms of the authorized level of funding it.  It kept diminishing from about $5 billion a year to the current $1.8 billion a year.

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
We did a number of things.  I gave you an overview of the background of it, what the issue is.  First thing is, we tried to organize everybody who had a stake.  So we tried to bring in all the stakeholders.  That meant the state regulatory bodies; the organizations of actual utility companies, public and private; all the people involved in the design and construction of utilities, like NSPE.  
NSPE has 60,000 members and we represent engineers in all sectors.  So for instance, two of the members on my government affairs committee are engineers who work for local water authorities in their local communities, one from Michigan, one from New York.  In addition, we have people who are designers, private engineering companies that design environmental facilities.  We have people in construction, the people who actually build the facilities.  So we represent a broad cross-section of the engineering community.  We also have all the suppliers, the vendors -- the pipe manufacturers, the people who make the equipment, the Water and Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers Association.  So it's a very broad coalition.  
We did a report, that was the first thing.  We knew the issue was out there.  But we had to establish a baseline basically, what the magnitude of it was.  From there we developed a set of recommendations as to not legislative language but specific principles that we felt our government in considering legislation ought to do.
The third thing we did was we hired, we contributed money beyond the studies to hire a lobbying firm that was closely involved in water-related legislation.  They had experience from both the House and Senate committees that had jurisdiction over the water bills, water authorizing bills.  So the first thing was to get the authorization up to a reasonable level for the SRF program.  Beyond that, we knew we were going to have to go in and fight the fight with the Appropriations Committee.  
The administration has been generally opposed to this, even though they support the upgrading of the system.  Their argument has been we don't have the money right now for domestic investment.  The target is homeland defense and upgrading of national defense capabilities.  So they testified, we had a whole series of hearings on both sides.  The administration testified against the proposed or recommended authorization level.  
It's not that EPA didn't recognize this, because we actually had a staff member from EPA who was kind of a consultant for them, an observer to a coalition, who provided us with information based on EPA's numbers.  We didn't rely on EPA numbers, but EPA and the GAO, we asked a member of the Senate who's been very supportive of water infrastructure to request the GAO to do an analysis.  As you know, the General Accounting Office is an independent auditing arm of the Congress.  
So the three separate documents – the EPA gap analysis, which is their own assessment of what the needs are, the GAO study, and our own study – they came out with slightly different final numbers, but they all came out showing the magnitude was substantial, the gap was at least $20 billion a year over the next twenty years.  Depending on how you accounted for it and how you weighted the numbers.  
We have gotten to the point where we have a bill now in the House and Senate.  It's been reported from the Senate it had a bunch of stuff in it that we didn't want that was added by environmental groups.  We have to work to try to neutralize that in conference.
They [the environmentalists] were part of our coalition, they had a group representing us.  Frankly, they essentially repudiated the coalition.  They thought all kinds of additional EPA regulatory conditions on the grants were necessary.  Plus they wanted additional eligibility for non [inaudible] sources, for non-discharge, non-infrastructure kind of soft [inaudible].  One of the groups recommended that there be rooftop gardens as a way of treating wastewater in cities.  That was a more extreme kind of examples.
One of the big issues for most cities, and Washington, D.C. is a good example of this, is Washington, D.C. sewers were put down so long ago that they have what's called combined sewers.  Which means you have sanitary sewers and storm sewers that flow into the same pipe.  In very heavy rain events, what happens is the treatment plants get inundated.  There are releases called combined sewer overflows, which are essentially valves that allow the combination of storm water and wastewater to discharge directly into the rivers, which is a violation of the Clean Water Act.  But the cost of separating the sewers or the additional treatment is enormous.  
As you can imagine, a city like San Francisco, which has a rainy season and also a very vertical streets, the amount of water in a storm event or major rainfall, is in the [millions/billions?] of gallons a day.  It's very low concentration in terms of pollution, but it's still untreated water.  So you have to have a huge capacity to treat this.
Without going into too many engineering details, we have attempted to broaden the coalition to include labor.  That means we have to accept some provisions that labor wanted that were not originally contemplated as part of the original bill, such as labor wage rates under the so-called Davis-Bacon Act, which is a 1930s act on fair labor rates.  Mainly so that the unions obviously – especially the building trade unions have a stake in this too, this is their jobs.  
We also brought in aspects in our testimony and in various other lobbying documents about the importance of security, especially water supply and drinking water.  The possibility of terrorism, to contaminate the drinking water is one way to attack the United States.  That the importance of providing resources was not only to upgrade the system but also to improve the security of the systems.  People generally can't live too many days without water.  You shut down the entire water supply for a city, that's going to be a lot of Evian.  Plus you're not going to have washing water, cooking water.  Water is taken for granted.
Obviously we've been working on this for several years.  September 11 changed the complexion of what people were responding to.  We did ads on that which appeared in Roll Call and various other newspapers that Capitol Hill people would do.  We did a series of public service announcements for radio.  We had various organizations, PR efforts to get interviews and op-ed pieces in local newspapers that members of Congress would read.  
So it's been a pretty organized campaign.  Large group of organizations representing a diverse interest with a common issue, stayed together, underwrote the cost of the investigation and research, underwrote the cost of the lobbying in addition to their own capability.  We have 2,500 members who are what we call ambassadors.  We send out a number of legislative alerts by e-mail to our members saying a bill's coming up, please send letters, e-mails, faxes.

We created a water infrastructure caucus and we got more than eighty members to sign up for the water infrastructure caucus.  We had the chairman and ranking members of the Water Resources and the Health subcommittees in Energy and Commerce and Transportation Infrastructure.  They were the founders of the water infrastructure caucus.  All their names began with B so we called them the killer B's.  Sometimes you have to use humor to get interest in this kind of thing.  We conducted a series of briefings for the staff of the members as well as the committees.  
We got bills introduced this year and they've been recorded from the Transportation Infrastructure Committee and from the Environment and Public Works Committee.  They are not everything we wanted, but they've got numbers.  The Senate committee's numbers are $40 billion authorization and the [inaudible] committee, which has jurisdiction over clean water, was $20 billion.  We're looking for a comparable bill to come up for drinking water from the Energy and Commerce Committee.  The jurisdiction is split in the House, it's together in the Senate.  So that's why we had to go to two separate committees.  Energy and Commerce has been distracted by a variety of things, like Enron, which is in their jurisdiction.  So they haven't gotten around to the drinking water bill.  But that's one of the issues we've been working a lot on.

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
No specific activities mentioned.

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
We created a water infrastructure caucus and we got more than eighty members to sign up for the water infrastructure caucus.  We had the chairman and ranking members of the Water Resources and the Health subcommittees in Energy and Commerce and Transportation Infrastructure.  They were the founders of the water infrastructure caucus.  All their names began with B so we called them the killer B's.  Sometimes you have to use humor to get interest in this kind of thing.  We conducted a series of briefings for the staff of the members as well as the committees.  

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY)

Targets of Direct Lobbying
None mentioned.

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
The WIN Coalition, members are listed in booklet in folder.

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
EPA, GAO

[Opposition]
Obviously the administration, in terms of the budget.  Some of the opposition seems to be coming from the environmental groups.  We tried to keep this as an infrastructure funding bill without getting into regulatory issues, because regulatory issues always get a lot of heat from environmental groups and other groups.  The environmental groups essentially intruded into the process, especially on the Senate side.  We've been told that they're attempting to derail the process in the House.

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
	The WIN coalition report, the GAO report and the EPA report all suggest the need for substantially greater federal funds to develop and replace the wastewater and drinking water infrastructure.	
	The State Revolving Fund is the best approach yet found for providing federal and state financial assistance to municipal governments as they seek to meet the water quality needs of their citizens. The SRFs are flexible and allow states to use the funds as needed locally while meeting federally mandated guidelines. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
We also brought in aspects in our testimony and in various other lobbying documents about the importance of security, especially water supply and drinking water.  The possibility of terrorism, to contaminate the drinking water is one way to attack the United States.  That the importance of providing resources was not only to upgrade the system but also to improve the security of the systems.  People generally can't live too many days without water.  You shut down the entire water supply for a city, that's going to be a lot of Evian.  Plus you're not going to have washing water, cooking water.  Water is taken for granted. Obviously we've been working on this for several years.  September 11 changed the complexion of what people were responding to.  

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
None mentioned.

Nature of the Opposition
Obviously the administration, in terms of the budget.  Some of the opposition seems to be coming from the environmental groups.  We tried to keep this as an infrastructure funding bill without getting into regulatory issues, because regulatory issues always get a lot of heat from environmental groups and other groups.  The environmental groups essentially intruded into the process, especially on the Senate side.  We've been told that they're attempting to derail the process in the House.

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
They're [the environmentalists] concerned that further investment in infrastructure will encourage growth.  We consistently said this is about replacement and renovation, growth is outside the scope of this.  It's the kind of standard environmental arguments about development and about more capacity in treatment systems will only encourage more people, more houses and more, more, more.  A lot of environmental groups are concerned about sprawl.  In most cases we're talking about, with the large systems you're talking about center cities.  

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
None mentioned.

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
None mentioned.

Described as a Partisan Issue
No.

Venue(s) of Activity
House Water Resources and the Health subcommittees in Energy & Commerce and Transportation Infrastructure.  

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
There is a bill now in the House and Senate.  It's been reported from the Senate

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
[Support increased funding for the State Revolving Funds]

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I've worked with engineers for a long time.  I guess you could call me a failed engineer.  I started out to be an engineer and calculus did me in.  So I switched over to political science.  But I'm essentially the kind of person, even though I understand the political process and that's what I do, I've worked with engineers for a long time so I can explain the technology, I can explain the technical issues to politicians, most of whom are not technically trained.  There are only four or five engineers in the entire Congress.  Lots of lawyers obviously.  Technically there are only two physicists, one Republican and one Democrat.

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We rely a lot on our members to provide us some of the things we write.  We occasionally will work with others to produce reports.  There's a greater credibility when a report is done by a respected source rather than by people who have perceived self-interest.  Obviously there's always the concern that a consultant is going to shape the data to favor the people paying their fee.  In this particular case, we used a firm that was well-respected, that had done work for EPA, that had done work for other sources, that were citing public sources to collate the data and do the analysis.  The fact that we had our report, the GAO report and EPA report all reach similar conclusions with some different numbers was persuasive.

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Four

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We have a department of four in the government relations department, but we obviously also use – you saw our Engineering Times, that's one of our vehicles to communicate to our members what the issues are and how engineering is involved in it.  

Obviously one of the things I haven't talked about is we have a PAC.  We're one of the few engineering organizations that has a PAC.  Which is defined in the tax code as a business or trade association.  We chose to do that, form an organization so we could have a PAC.  It's not a very big PAC, we average about $200,000 a cycle, election cycle.  
There's only one reason to have a PAC, well, two reasons.  To help your friends get reelected and help defeat the enemies by getting better people to challenge them, particularly with open seats, to make sure they put people good in open seats.  We try to target our money, not having a really big PAC, compared to the AMA or National Rifle Association.  Anybody with a million-dollar PAC has a lot more flexibility in terms of the size of the amounts they can give to candidates.  But with campaign finance reform, hard money is going to be more important than ever.  Soft money is going to probably leave.  So more and more personal contributions, so PACs are going to be significant for that.  
That's another way we use – the whole purpose of the PAC is to support our legislative program.  We want to make sure that folks sympathetic to our issues are reelected.  The fact that we're also somewhat of a federation, we have state societies as well.  A lot of the issues, increasingly when new people come into Congress are mostly coming out of the state legislatures.  The change in the last twenty years in the quality of people going into the state legislatures has markedly improved.  These people very often are folks who are really doing their homework.  
I had breakfast this morning with a freshman who's a good example of that.  His name is Mark Kirk, he's from Illinois.  He was a naval officer who was a staffer on two congressional committees.  He was a chief of staff to a member.  He had a lot of experience overseas, going to Kosovo and Kuwait.  He's one of the few combat veterans that are younger members.  He comes from a very competitive district in the suburbs of Chicago.  It's folks like that as well as folks like Adam Putnam,  from New Jersey, younger members with only a few years seniority.  But they all came from other places where they had experience.  They really understood the issues.  
We try to identify people like that and support folks like that, because when you support them the first time they remember you.  Even if we can't give them $5,000, which is the maximum you can give in a primary or general election, they remember that and we build that relationship.  We go back in and talk to them, say these are our issues and concerns.  We get our local members, we use the PAC contributions.  We go to the local event, we send the check home to the home district.  We have one of our members hand them the check and have a conversation.  
So those are other kinds of lobbying techniques we use that are supportive of the relationship building.  An awful lot of that lobbying is not about who's got the best policy.  Policy is important, but it's those relationships.  Because you're really trying to build a credibility and trust relationship with members of Congress.  So when I go to see Sherwood Boehlert who's the chairman of the Science Committee from upstate New York –
He's one of the B's.  In the last Congress he was one of the better resources, he's from upstate New York.  He knows me by my first name and he knows what we stand for.  They did a hearing on the World Trade Center a couple weeks ago that was primarily the responsibility of the American Society of Civil Engineers, who did a lot of work about structures and fire and stuff like that.  But he's also very active in the math and science partnerships.  He was a county executive in New York State before he came to Congress.  He worked with engineers on local projects.  He knew who engineers were before he came to Congress.  
The difference between the members who are coming up now as opposed to the members who came up in the period 1984-1994, which was the Gingrich revolution, those members were very ideological.  The newer members are very practical and understand that politics is complex.  Politics is not just about who's in favor of national security, who's in favor of abortion.  The litmus test, ideological folks, most of them have either figured it out that it's much more complex than they thought, more than just about cutting taxes and banning abortion.  Those are the conservatives who basically have never gotten it, that governing is hard.  It was real easy when the Republicans were in the minority.  I'm not saying they're all bad.  Newt Gingrich was an incredibly bright man.  But building those relationships with people who are problem solvers, who are doers, who have the experience –

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Individual 

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
60,000

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous

[He spoke at length about some other issues:]

We also worked on brownfields, which is about inner city growth, old industrial lands.  We've worked on the brownfields bill, we encouraged that as a federal program as well, to reuse somewhat contaminated industrial land so that it could be redeveloped for other uses, so that the insurance industry and developers and so on would come in and work on these properties without fear of getting sued if they discovered major contamination.
A lot of this comes down to liability concerns.  I don't want to get sidetracked on that from the water thing.  But brownfields is a good example of where we were doing something that was totally consistent with what the environmentalists wanted.  Have you ever been to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania?
Eighteen hundred acres along the river there in downtown Bethlehem is the Beth Works, that's where Bethlehem Steel got started.  Bethlehem Steel went out of business and left eighteen hundred acres of polluted industrial property there that essentially is preventing the town – until that's cleaned up and some of those buildings torn down, some converted into other uses, commercial, residential, education.  They're creating a museum of steel.  Governor Ridge was very instrumental in helping get the first part of that going, the first couple hundred acres in the center of the Beth Works is now being redeveloped.  That's what brownfields is all about, mostly in the Rust Belt.

Lots of different types of engineering are involved [inaudible] issues, aside from production issues.  Part of our group is called the Professional Engineers in Industry.  Many of them work for utilities, mostly electric utilities.  The whole electricity generation, distribution, energy efficiency, all engineering, design and building of those things [inaudible] things.  The energy production companies, [inaudible] companies and so on, all employ a lot of engineers.  The models that have been developed for [inaudible] for instance was all done based on geologic engineering.  So engineering is critical to energy.  
The major changes that are going to happen in energy are all going to be a function of research and development mostly being done by engineers and scientists.  So for instance, development of fuel cells, which is going to be the replacement for the internal combustion engine.  Work in fuel cells was developed really from NASA, that was one of the first applications.  The lunar missions all had fuel cells as a way of producing energy in a safe way that didn't produce byproducts, that was virtually foolproof because they don't have a lot of moving parts.  So fuel cells is the future in terms of transportation.  It also may be the future in terms of remote locations where getting power lines [inaudible] is expensive and difficult.  
Clearly, the fifth generation of nuclear power plants is also going to be a key thing.  Obviously nuclear power plants don't produce greenhouse gases.  Waste production is a problem, waste disposal.  [inaudible] Yucca Mountain for.  But all these things are engineering issues.  The public policy solutions to them all involve engineering.  
So we saw energy as a very critical issue for us.  Again, we're a part of a major coalition, called the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth.  It was organized by the Chamber of Commerce.  Grew to a point where over 1,300 organizations were part of it.  It was the major reason why [inaudible] momentum.  Remember last year we had very high gasoline prices and then the gasoline prices came back down, in some cases back to below a dollar a gallon.  The public doesn't react to issues like us, develop policy like us, put pressure on issues that are strong negatives to some groups.  
We had a strong negative with the [inaudible] development ANWR, which the media did a terrible disservice to the American people.  They talked about the energy policy as if that was the only thing in the energy policy.  Domestic production was a critical issue, coming up with a revised policy on exploration and development on federal lands [inaudible] was just as important as ANWR.  ANWR obviously became a signature issue, partly because Senator [inaudible] from Alaska is the ranking member, formerly the chairman of the Energy Committee in the Senate.  So he talked about it all the time.  It was inevitable it would become one of the more significant issues.  
Of course all the environmental groups published in many cases misleading if not downright false pictures of what ANWR looks like.  The picture you almost always see when you read an environmental publication is a picture of the [inaudible] Range, which is one of the most majestic mountain ranges in the country.  I think Mount McKinley is part of the [inaudible] Range.  But it's very high mountains above this plateau that is covered with wildflowers, where caribou peacefully graze.
This is the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, several million acres that was basically [inaudible].  It's about forty or fifty miles down the coast from Prudhoe Bay, which is a major development place.  So a lot of people say, if you want to know what ANWR is going to look like, look at Prudhoe Bay.  Prudhoe Bay is a model of how a heavy industrial site is environmentally maintained in a way – they [inaudible] tracking the animals is not good.  Animals are attracted to heat, light, garbage.  They didn't want polar bears there, they didn't want the Arctic foxes.  In fact, because Prudhoe Bay, there's not a lot to do there, the workers there actually get involved in a lot of environmental projects.  This is the kind of thing the media didn't pick up.
There are a lot more issues that we were concerned about.  For instance, efficiency.  We use the term efficiency rather than conservation.  Everybody talks about conservation in terms of things like CAFE standards.  There are an awful lot of things that can be done to improve efficiency so that the same thing can be done with less power or more [inaudible] same power.  
Two examples of this are two projects that were done without any regard to the energy bill but other kinds of policies.  Energy, except where you have public power, like the city of Los Angeles has a public power system, and there are some other cities around that have public power.  Power is almost entirely a private enterprise.  Everything from the grids moving electricity to the pipelines, they're all privately owned.  This is all private investment.  So why do you [inaudible] creating policy that's going to encourage private investment?  Tax policy and other things.  
There are some policies, however, that don't require any additional federal dollars, they just require that certain sanctions be taken away.  A good example of that is, there was a project done that was authorized by Congress to solve some very difficult energy problems by essentially allowing the private sector to work together without concern about the antitrust laws.  The two signal projects on this was how to develop a more – what do you think is the highest consumption appliance in the normal household?
Interviewer:  Washing machine?  Refrigerator?
Interviewee:  Refrigerator, right.  It's running all the time.  It has another significant problem, primarily works by the compression of freon, which is a gas that when released creates problems for the ozone layer, depletes the ozone layer.  So finding an alternative to freon and a much more efficient refrigerator were the critical [inaudible].  The companies that make refrigerators, research and development into a new type of refrigerator that would not only use less power but work by a system other than the use of freon or related gases.  [inaudible] we said okay, we're going to suspend the antitrust provisions to allow competitors to work together in a common research and development effort with the patents being owned essentially by the government but licensing back to the companies that make refrigerators.
The other major project that's still – and by the way, the refrigerators, we haven't gotten a breakthrough yet but are getting much more efficient.  There are now carbon dioxide refrigerators that are being tested.  Within the next five to ten years, refrigeration [inaudible] will be totally different.
The other one was [inaudible] acid or heavy metal storage battery.  Which is probably to my mind one of the nastiest things we've ever developed, that acid storage battery.  Lead is a very significant pollutant, in the environment produces retardation in children, it's very persistent, doesn't combine with much else.  [inaudible] can be made from things which are toxic.  Refining of lead is a real nasty process.  Lead [inaudible], there are parts of the West that are just totally contaminated from lead smelting and things like that.  Because lead was a very valuable – paint used to have lead in it.  Because it had anti-rust properties, since lead is nonreactive, you put lead compounds into paint, it was much less likely that it would rust.  We got rid of lead in paint, we no longer have lead in paint.  
Getting lead out of the environment is very crucial.  But the lead storage battery is a crucial place in which vehicles and other kinds of things, engines, to get them started, provides the basic spark to keep them going.  Again, a lot of breakthroughs are on the way.  A lot of progress has been made.  It wasn't about tax incentives or anything, it was really about allowing competitors to work together on a common research project.
Research and development is another thing we support very strongly.  Professional engineering and education are [inaudible] and other folks who are running engineering schools.  One of the ways you get advanced degrees is you work on research projects.  So grants from the National Science Foundation, from the National Institutes of Science and Technology, from the Department of Energy, from EPA, go back to universities.
The other piece was the R&D tax credit which we've been working on, which was originally part of the president's tax package but was dropped and instead a five-year extension which expires in 2004.  That's another issue we've been working on, to make the R&D tax credit permanent so companies can plan their research and development efforts and know the tax break is going to be there.
Going back to energy, we work very closely with a large group of people.  The Congress began to realize this is more than about Exxon Mobil and Association of Gas Utilities, AGA, American Gas Association, the Edison Electric Institute.  It's lots of other folks out there involved in energy and very concerned.  Of course, the environmentalists weighed in again and various other consumer groups weighed in.  CAFE standards was a big issue [inaudible].  Automotive fuel efficiency.  Basically that was all killed on the floor in the Senate because of competing provisions.
So now we have two very different bills, HR 4, which is the House version that we passed almost a year ago, August 2001.  And 517, which is the Senate version, that was passed and much more oriented toward alternative fuels.  The big giveaway there was a tripling of the – it was a difference of a nickel in federal taxes and incentives between ethanol-treated gasoline and other oxygenated [inaudible].  You've heard about NBT?
Interviewer:  [inaudible]
Interviewee:  NBT was an additive that was developed because it essentially reduces smog, added to the gasoline.  The big problem with NBT is that it's essentially a super-solvent and what it does, if it gets loose it had a tremendous ability to contaminate groundwater.  Since it's a super-solvent it goes right through to the groundwater very quickly.  A gallon of NBT can contaminate several hundred thousand gallons of groundwater.  Does very well in gasoline.  The problem was that in the corn states, the Republicans and Democrats [inaudible] we have a chance here for a real bounty.  Let's expand the amount of ethanol, get rid of the NBT.  While the coastal states, transporting ethanol is very difficult.  It's nontoxic but it's very corrosive, because it sucks water out of the air so it puts the entire tank trucks [inaudible].  Ethanol is also a liquor.  That's why ethanol was developed, to make alcohol toxic so people wouldn't drink it.
Anyway, the whole point was that was a big deal in the energy bill, because it would increase the need for corn production.  The problem was that ethanol as an additive to gasoline has a nickel a gallon [inaudible] tax than other gasoline.  [inaudible] a gallon federal tax on gasoline is part of the trust fund that goes for [inaudible] and highways and so on.  It's the way we pay for that kind of infrastructure.  Ethanol-treated gasoline only has a 13.5 cent so it's going to have an impact on the highway trust fund.  So that was one of the reasons that a lot of us in the engineer and construction business were concerned about expanding ethanol.  We didn't get into the details about it, it was too difficult, too much was going on at the same time.
Interviewer:  I don't want to take up too much of your time.
Interviewee:  I want to talk about one more issue.  Another coalition.  In the education bill, which is another one of the big bills, Title II was about math and science education.  A coalition was put together that was called Science, Math, Engineering and Technology Coalition, SMET.  The whole point was to increase funding for math and science partnerships.  Math and science teachers are [inaudible] very hard to find partners [inaudible] high-tech industry.  
Teaching in public school is difficult, not enough math and science teachers are being trained, salaries are too low.  When Secretary Paige had his confirmation hearing, he was the superintendent of the Houston school district, he said that Texas Instrument and several other big high-tech companies were siphoning off math and science teachers from the Houston school system because they could make more money and get better benefits, better hours.  The discipline problems in schools.
We don't teach science and math very well in this country.  Kids don't want to take it, it's hard, it requires work.  NSPE tried to deal with this a few years ago, make an effort to [inaudible].  Twenty years ago we created a program called Math Counts, which is like a spelling bee except it's for solving math problems.  As part of that, we also developed a new [inaudible] curriculum for teaching math [inaudible] engineering.  So we've been concerned about this for a long time.

Technically there are only two physicists, one Republican and one Democrat.  They were both very involved in this math-science partnerships issue.  
We've got $450 million authorized in the math and science partnerships.  That's only half the struggle.  Math and science partnerships is money that goes back out to the states in block grants, primarily to assist the encouragement of teaching by providing summer jobs or years off for math and science teachers to go and work in laboratories, to go work with private companies, to go work in [inaudible] federal agencies.  To see what the applications of math and science are, to improve the way that they teach math and science.  They will get grants or stipends or other things to do that.  It would also create other programs that would improve the compensation for math and science teachers.  
	The problem was that the bottom line is that the appropriation, because the bill passed so late, [inaudible] $450 million authorized, only $12.5 million was appropriated.  That's a huge cutback.  Because there was so much money in the education bill, the Education Department has reprogrammed some money.  But we still feel [inaudible] some kind of funding approaching the authorization should be included in it.