Haley Stevens: “today the Citizens Against Government Waste issued their 2001 Pork List. I am here to discuss that briefly. Five items…”

“today the Citizens Against Government Waste issued their 2001 Pork List. I am here to discuss that briefly. Five items on the first page of this list were requested in the President's budget as part of the Corps of Engineers regular program, but they are charged to be pork. Those were requested by President Clinton and his administration, not by me. Also, $11 million listed as pork in the Interior Department budget was also requested by the President, not me, to manage fish and game in Alaska. It shows the accuracy of this list. Other items listed on this 'waste' list include runway lights. It so happens that 80 villages in Alaska have no roads or hospitals. They depend on medical evacuation by aircraft when people have babies, suffer a heart attack, or have to have medical assistance. Those same villages have no runway lights at all. North of the Arctic Circle, the Sun doesn't even rise beginning in mid-December until the end of the following January, making it impossible for an evacuation plane to land without lights. In fact, this is a persistent problem for us all winter throughout Alaska. After a Native man in Hoonah, AK, suffered a heart attack and sat on the tarmac for 3 days waiting for medical evacuation, the mayor wrote to me and asked for runway lights. We looked into it and found that it was true. I really did not realize there were so many of these small airports that had no lights.”