Dan Burton: “I do not think this is a controversial amendment. I have cleared it with the majority and with the ranking minority…”

“I do not think this is a controversial amendment. I have cleared it with the majority and with the ranking minority member, the gentlewoman from Illinois [Mrs. Collins]. Exempting the public sector and their private sector competitors from unfunded Federal mandates could also burden private sector entities which are not competing with the public sector. They may bear a larger share of the burden of meeting the mandate if the mandate itself is unchanged. For example, and this is a hypothetical example: City governments are exempted from a new clean air mandate for their vehicles. But the new clean air bill overall still requires pollutants to be reduced by 100 million tons. That is even though the cities will be exempt from it. Therefore, since city-owned vehicles are exempt from the mandate, privately owned vehicles collectively must bear a larger share of the burden of accomplishing the 100 million tons of pollution reduction. Even though there is not competition, we would still have the public sector relief, which we support, inadvertently hurting the private sector. So we just want the Commission to study this in the event that this might occur in the future.”