Ted Stevens: “I have high confidence in the Senator from Montana. But it was 25 years ago that I stood here with the Senator from…”

“I have high confidence in the Senator from Montana. But it was 25 years ago that I stood here with the Senator from Massachusetts and thought that we had a bill passed that would help us try to meet this problem. Year in and year out, we have had funding for projects and they have always come off the shelf. No one spent any money at all to develop new technology. We are now 25 years along the line and they are still talking about doing the same thing. Do you know that they take new, prefabricated HUD homes to Alaska and they have the flushing toilets and the sinks and all the pipes and all you have to do is connect them? But, guess what? There is no running water in the village. There is no ability to use those flushing toilets. They are a monument to our capability to buy things in bulk and to think that off-the-shelf technology solves every one's problems--one size fits all. The only trouble is, there is nothing to hook those toilets up to. I bet we spend more money sending toilets to places that do not have any systems than we would need to develop new technology.”