Tom Carper

The gap between people's expectations and what the government is delivering is at an all-time high.

Public policy should really try to leverage market forces.

We are very much attempting to be transparent.

We need to keep our eye on the ball.

It is to use technology ultimately to serve the American people.

We need to make sure that it is not repeated again.

Clearly, doing infrastructure, we need to do infrastructure, as I think most of you have emphasized in your testimony, because it is an investment in the future.

Our role--what can we do to foster that sort of development? My question is what can we do at the Federal level to help encourage and nurture and foster those kinds of activities?

I want to turn to the issue of looking for opportunities to find multi-modal solutions to our transportation challenges.

I guess I would be remiss if I did not mention before we leave here that the vast majority of your agents and employees do a great job.

I believe having the authority to require polygraph examinations as part of the periodic reinvestigation process would be helpful.

We are going to keep the record open for 15 days, and there will be some other questions from other Subcommittee Members.

I believe that continued reliance on the gas tax is really not sustainable

We are not competitive with the rest of the world when we spend twice as much as the rest of the world for healthcare and do not get better results.

Businesses do need certainty and predictability. They did then and they do now.

We believe that this is an important step forward and we look forward to working with you on it.

I can remember times when we literally shut down our State's economy and would still be out of attainment because of the transport of the emissions from other places upwind.

But it gives people the flexibility to make that choice and ensure that we have both clean air and reliable power.

That is the largest of the four, is it not?

A lower cap, I think, clearly could be achieved.

Do you think that it might be possible for us to meet a tighter mark for NOx in the East?

I think that clearly it is a step that helps address some of the concerns that we have to get into attainment as quickly as possible to bring the benefits of clean air to our residents as fast as we possibly can.

We have heard, at least from some northeastern States, that our nitrogen oxide targets for the East are not strong enough to help States meet new EPA ozone air quality rules.

But again, if you are getting up to the 70-80 percent level at every one, what you have to do in order to achieve an overall 90, you are still only talking about very small differences between those plants.

Now what if instead of having those plants all co-located together in one part of Sussex County they had one or two in Sussex County, another north in Kent County, and another one all the way further north in New Castle County.