Political Quotes

“I support the Hutchison- Bingaman amendment and am pleased to cosponsor it. The purpose of my addressing the issue is two fold: One, to impress upon my fellow Members that if Congress intends to have input into the BRAC process, the only real time to do this is during the current session. While ``BRAC 2005'' leads people to believe that we have several years before we have to worry about this, the truth is that the criteria must be published prior to the end of 2003, and hence we should provide our input in 2002; two, this legislation, sponsored by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson sets up criteria that must be met before consideration in closing a military facility. We are not eliminating the ability of DoD to run the process, we are pursuing legislation that will clarify the process. To bring the process out into the open allowing us all to see how a decision was derived and these are decisions that affects thousands of people and cost many millions or billions of dollars. It is time to bring--businesslike competitive accounting into the consideration process when dealing with issues of BRAC. The Hutchison legislation will accomplish that by simply establishing some minimal, measurable, and articulated standards to be used in making major decisions. Some of these issues are: environmental costs, costs of Federal and State environmental compliance laws; costs and effects of relocating critical infrastructure; anticipated savings vs.…”