Martin Sabo: “this is a good bill. I hope we pass it. As always, a bill does not reflect everything each of us might want or what…”

“this is a good bill. I hope we pass it. As always, a bill does not reflect everything each of us might want or what either the House or the Senate might want, but is a compromise. This is a reasonable bill within the money available. I think it treats the various programs fairly. It treats the huge array of requests we had for funding fairly on a bipartisan basis, and I urge support of the conference report. I just want to take a moment to express my thanks to my staff, the minority staff, Cheryl Smith and Marge Duske from my personal office, and the majority staff, John Blazey, Rich Efford, Stephanie Gupta, Linda Muir, and David Whitestone. They do outstanding work on behalf of us. I rise in strong support of the conference report on the FY2000 Transportation Appropriations conference report. I want to commend the gentleman from Virginia for his tireless work in hammering out fair and sensible compromises on the many difficult and controversial issues that the transportation conferees were faced with this year. One of the most difficult issues we faced concerned driver privacy and the release of photographs and personal information contained on driver records. I am not convinced that we arrived at the best solution, but there was strong interest in the conference in restricting the release of sensitive, information such as social security numbers that are included on these records.”