Dan Coats: “No. 1, we passed this legislation in 1996. So the agreement that we had reached relative to using 1993 was acceptable to…”

“No. 1, we passed this legislation in 1996. So the agreement that we had reached relative to using 1993 was acceptable to the State of New York, the State of New Jersey, and other exporters just in the last Congress. In fact, we passed it twice in the last Congress. There was no request at that time, in 1996, to change the base year from--in fact, we offered 1993 or 1994, and 1993 was a more acceptable year-- there was no request then to address the concern that the Senator from New York has just raised relative to having to change that base year to accommodate what might be perceived as increased exports. Secondly, I will state again for the Record that we have been repeatedly assured by exporters--by exporting States that all they needed was a little bit of time to develop more of their own capacity and that actually I think it would be just as logical a request from the Senator from Indiana or anybody from an importing State to request that we use a lower amount rather than a higher amount, because 10 years ago everybody said, this won't be a problem; 10 years ago, people said 5 years from then it wouldn't be a problem, because all they needed was 3 or 4 years to sort of get their own act together. We understood that, and we understood the prodigious volumes of municipal waste they were generating. The population in the Senator's State I don't believe has significantly increased.”