Conrad Burns: “There are some very good things in this bill. There are some things that give us all a little heartburn. I will say…”

“There are some very good things in this bill. There are some things that give us all a little heartburn. I will say, ``on a voluntary basis'' is mentioned 75 times in this bill. That sounds like overkill to me, and it also raises my curiosity about why it should be mentioned that many times. Education in my State is probably the No. 1 issue. We have gone through a restructuring of our higher education. The money that is collected on personal property taxes in Montana is a driving force in every local Government. We are trying to do more with less. My concern, coming out of local government, is the thing called unfunded mandates. Those unfunded mandates may be cloaked in many disguises. There are quite a few of them in this piece of legislation, but as it works its way through the debate, I hope that we can deal with some of those. I do support the seven national education goals because I think we, as a nation, should have something to shoot for, but it seems like whenever you start setting a bureaucracy in place, those goals take on a new meaning.”