Donald Manzullo: “this is a very immodest request that's part of an overall strategy to revitalize an economically depressed area of…”

“this is a very immodest request that's part of an overall strategy to revitalize an economically depressed area of downtown Rockford. The City of Rockford led the Nation in unemployment in 1980 at 25 percent. We lost 14,000 highly skilled manufacturing jobs at many of our over 1,500 factories in the area. What this money does, it sets up a paleontology lab, which is an extension of Northern Illinois University, into the Burpee Museum of Natural History itself. This is astonishing because what it is doing, it's moving many of the assets of this great university to a city 30 miles away, and the reason that that lab has been created in Rockford is because of the incredible finds that were made by the university in terms of the paleontologist digs several years ago in Montana with regard to dinosaur projects. There are currently eight Northern Illinois University faculty and 13 graduate and undergraduate students working on various cutting-edge physical science projects at the Burpee Museum. Thus, the request is ready to be used to support these research projects by Northern Illinois University students and staff utilizing the laboratories at Burpee Museum in Rockford. With this assistance, Burpee Museum is becoming one of the foremost places in the world to study and view paleontology. What we lost with our manufacturing base we're trying to compensate for in an educational center and people coming to town in order to tour this great center.”