Category: Spring 2007 Newswire
Congress Left Out in the Cold in Global Warming Debate
EPA
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Danny Lauridsen
Boston University Washington News Service
4-26-07
WASHINGTON, April 26 –The global warming debate is heating up on Capitol Hill, but Congress isn’t the branch turning the knob.
On April 2, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Clean Air Act by refusing to regulate motor vehicle carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists generally believe that man-made carbon dioxide emissions, from motor vehicles and other sources, are largely responsible for global climate change.
With a climate of increasing urgency nationwide, states like Massachusetts and California have taken the lead in reducing climate change-related emissions at a regional level, while the Supreme Court decision was a blow to the Bush administration’s stance that the EPA could not regulate carbon dioxide. But where punches have been thrown in the hottest political battle in the country, the legislative branch has found itself left out in the cold.
U.S. Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., recognized that he and fellow legislators have fallen behind state and regional efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions, but he applauded recent Massachusetts efforts, such as the Supreme Court case in which the state served as the lead plaintiff and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a compact among northeastern states.
Both, said Sen. Kerry, have set precedents for the federal government to follow.
A study released in April by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group lists Massachusetts among the lowest carbon-emitting states, but state officials admit that the Bay State does not currently have an official system in place to track and measure carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles.
While Sen. Kerry is pushing his own climate change legislation through the Senate, he and many other Democrats fault the Bush administration for stalling on what they argue is an urgent crisis. But they express hope that the Supreme Court’s decision will send a clear message that climate change is a federal issue.
“It’s an historic moment when the Supreme Court has to step in to protect the environment from the Bush administration” Mr. Kerry said. “The White House now must go back and take a fresh look at regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The time to act is now.”
U.S. Rep. John W. Olver, D-Amherst, also cited the Bush administration as the key obstacle in enacting an effective climate change overhaul.
“We just happen to have an anti-scientist in the White House at this moment,” Mr. Olver said. “Any new administration will simply have to affirm that global warming and climate change are occurring.”
Sen. Kerry and Rep. Olver seem likely to be disappointed. Testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on April 24, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson repeatedly declined to say when and how his agency would comply with the Supreme Court’s decision.
Mr. Olver, who has his own climate change bill pending in the House, said he thinks the climate change debate “absolutely” will pick up steam after the 2008 presidential election, but he said he would like to see much more done before President Bush leaves office.
Mr. Olver said that while the President would never sign a bill that would put strict restrictions on emissions levels, Mr. Bush might agree to a “cap-and-trade” program, which would allow companies with emissions levels below a fixed amount to “sell” their excess pollution allowances to companies with levels above the fixed amount, thus rewarding more environmentally friendly companies.
“He, while he is president, will not go beyond cap-and-trade, but might get pushed into cap-and-trade some time within the next 18 months,” Mr. Olver said.
And though he isn’t sure what kind of action the Supreme Court’s decision will push the president into taking, Mr. Olver said it will supply some added pressure – something Congress was unable to accomplish.
“EPA is not going to take initiative until the administration decides that they must do so because the political fallout from not doing so is too great,” he said.
But environmental groups in Massachusetts are worried that political pressure may come too late.
“Congress has really dropped the ball on this,” said Jack Clarke, director of public policy and government relations at Mass Audubon, the largest conservation organization in New England.
Mr. Clarke said that while separate regional efforts are being taken by groups of states across the country, the industries largely responsible for the increasing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions –the electric generating industry, whose plants generate the most carbon dioxide in the United States, and the automobile industry – will not make the necessary changes to reduce emissions until they have one federal standard to regulate carbon emissions in plants and motor vehicles instead of one for each state, and he sees the Supreme Court’s decision as the first step toward that end.
The decision “will force the automobile industry and the electric generating industry to put pressure on the Bush administration to put out uniform regulations regarding CO2 emissions and miles per gallon,” Mr. Clarke said.
Ken Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is studying air pollution and climate change policy, said that while the automobile industry will not be happy about the decision, it’s still too early to see how it will be affected specifically.
“They’re already facing a huge amount of challenges,” Mr. Green said. “I can’t imagine they’re hungry for another one on their plate, but at this point we’re sort of in limbo waiting on EPA.”
Mr. Green will be holding a conference for lawyers and officials involved in the Massachusetts case in the coming weeks to discuss how broad the impacts of the case will be and “to give us the good, the bad and the ugly of the whole thing.” He said it was up to EPA to decide how it will regulate emissions, and until it acts, it remains unclear how the industry will be affected.
“We’re really in the early days of the ramifications of this decision,” he said. “The point of the suit was to force federal implementation by EPA, so it should have little effect on the states other than to move agencies that way.”
Uniform regulations also would be necessary in regulating pollution between regions. For instance, much of the pollution in the Northeast floats over from the industrial midwest, making it difficult for states in New England to regulate regional emissions without a federal standard.
Mr. Clarke also promised that while President Bush failed to follow through on campaign pledges to curb climate change, the next president will be held to a much tighter standard.
“The writing is on the wall that the next administration will be taking up the campaign promise that Bush made originally that he would regulate CO2 emissions,” he added.
But for now, state and regional efforts continue to set the tone on capping emissions.
In January, Massachusetts joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, committing the Commonwealth to a multi-state effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and tackle global climate change by developing cap-and-trade programs across the Northeast.
Although the effort started in 2005, then-Gov. Mitt Romney decided not to sign on. But Gov. Deval Patrick did on Jan. 18, making Massachusetts the ninth state to join the effort.
At the signing, Mr. Patrick pledged to use the proceeds of the sale of emissions allowances to fund an aggressive program of energy savings for households and industry.
“Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time,” he said. “On this day, we want everyone to know that Massachusetts will not stand on the sidelines.”
Bob Keough, spokesman for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said that although the state had stood on the sidelines of the initiative for the two previous years, it has always been working to improve its environment and regulate its carbon emissions.
“That was a decision made by the prior administrations which had concerns, which were legitimate, about the potential cost impact” of the regional compact, he said, adding that Mr. Patrick has concluded that “we will be able to keep price increases down.”
“The Carbon Boom,” which the U.S. Public Interest Research Group released April 12, found that while U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel consumption grew from almost 5 billion metric tons to almost 5.9 billion metric tons between 1990 and 2004, an increase of 18 percent, there were no increases in emissions in Delaware, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
“Many states are not waiting for federal legislation to combat climate change,” Mr. Kerry said. “Lots of states, including Massachusetts through RGGI [the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative], have already taken it upon themselves to address climate change.”
But such regional efforts could be severely affected by federal legislation, and current bills proposed in Congress feature a potpourri of possible emissions requirements, some much tougher than others.
Mr. Kerry’s bill, which he introduced Feb. 1 with U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, calls for a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 65 percent below 2000 levels by 2050.
Mr. Olver’s bill, introduced with Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, R-Md., in the last two congressional sessions and reintroduced on the eve of President Bush’s State of the Union speech this year, calls for a 75 percent reduction of emissions in the next 50 years.
Other Senate bills have been introduced by Sens. John S. McCain, R-Ariz., and Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., and by Sens. Barbara L. Boxer, D-Calif., and Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., and other House legislation has been introduced by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif.
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative was started in 2003 when then-New York Gov. George E. Pataki sent letters to the 11 governors from Maine to Maryland, inviting participation in a cooperative, regional effort.
In December 2005, seven states – Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Vermont – agreed to participate, with Massachusetts and Rhode Island signing on this year.
It will help states reach previously set goals, such as those established by the New England governors and the Eastern Canadian premiers in a Climate Change Action Plan issued in August 2001, which calls for the reduction of greenhouse gases to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Mr. Patrick also renewed that effort when he signed the regional initiative.
Under the initiative, annual emissions of CO2 in Massachusetts from power plants of 25 megawatts and larger will be capped at approximately 26 million tons annually statewide from 2009 through 2014, then reduced incrementally by 2.5 percent per year for the next four years.
On the West Coast, the governors of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington have a similar agreement known as the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative.
On top of this, many states, including Massachusetts, have adopted the California energy emissions standards, which require that every new car sold emit 30 percent less carbon dioxide, 20 percent fewer toxic pollutants and up to 20 percent fewer smog-causing pollutants than the established federal standards.
“California has taken the lead on emissions standards, and they will continue to do so,” Mr. Keough said, adding that Massachusetts would not have the legal authority by itself to regulate emissions standards. “It has to follow California’s lead,” he said.
But when the federal government will do so – and what the effects of such legislation would be – is yet to be determined.
Mr. Kerry said: “It’s still too early to say what would happen to those efforts if federal legislation passes, because we don’t know what that would look like. But the important thing is that individual states are acting.”
He added, “I am proud that Gov. Patrick decided to have Massachusetts rejoin RGGI and tackle greenhouse gas emissions. It was the right decision for our environment, our economy and our security.”
Mr. Keough said requirements from the initiative would ultimately supersede current plant regulations.
“Massachusetts has led the way,” Mr. Kerry said. “The Supreme Court has spoken, Americans are making themselves heard and we’re going to keep fighting until a serious solution to climate change is enacted.”
-30-
Immigration Legislation in Washington Must be Comprehensive, All Agree
IMMIGRATION
New Bedford Standard-Times
Valerie Sullivan
Boston University Washington News Service
26 April 2007
WASHINGTON, April 26 —When federal immigration officials stormed New Bedford’s Michael Bianco Inc. factory in early March, detaining 361 Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition illegal immigrants and arresting the company’s owner and top managers, immigration reform once again moved into the legislative spotlight.
Within days, both Massachusetts senators had declared the immigration system “broken” and vowed to support laws that would improve it.
Today, many of those detained immigrants have been released and are awaiting hearings. The future of each is unknown; some face deportation, others asylum.
The future of immigration legislation in Congress is equally unknown – but by no means stagnant.
New immigration reform bills are introduced every month in Congress by members from across the country. But many of those bills “tend to focus only on enforcement measures,” Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said. “We need to take a more comprehensive approach.”
Both Sen. Kerry and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., voted last year for a bill that would have tightened border security by increasing the number of border patrol officers, constructing additional fencing along the southern border and creating harsher penalties for the construction of illegal border tunnels.
The bill also would have expanded the number of offenses resulting in mandatory detention and deportation, increased penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants, and created a temporary guest worker program that included a path to potential legal residency.
To reduce the backlog, the bill proposed increasing the total number of immigrants allowed to gain employment and legal status.
The bill, which collapsed into another bill sponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., ultimately passed, 62-36, but died in the House Judiciary Committee before the end of the last Congress.
“Sen. Kennedy and Sen. [John] McCain [R-Ariz.] have shown the way forward towards sensible reform that provides both a path to citizenship for the illegal immigrants who are already part of the life of our communities, as well as smart, tough enforcement of our laws,” Sen. Kerry said.
Sen. Kennedy, according to his office, is negotiating the details of a new bill on the Senate side. Although the details are unknown, Sen. Kennedy has said, “Only a plan that offers a path to earned citizenship will fix our broken system.”
On the House side, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Newton, is co-sponsoring with Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., a bill that would increase the number of border and enforcement personnel, employ new unmanned aerial vehicles, cameras and sensors on the border, increase penalties for illegal immigrants within the United States, tighten employment verification standards and create a new worker visa program. The bill would also include an opportunity for earned citizenship and legalization.
The bill is not perfect, Rep. Frank said, but it does provide better solutions for the current situation.
Sen. Kennedy said he supports Frank’s bill. The support is reciprocal. “I’m really supportive of Kennedy and his approach,” Rep. Frank said.
Mr. Frank’s bill is similar to last year’s McCain-Kennedy bill before it was amended on the Senate floor. According to Jeanne Butterfield, the executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the new legislation “embraces the framework [of last year’s bill] and makes improvements to make it more workable.”
It “streamlines and simplifies” the complexities the Senate added to the bill and provides immigrants with “a very clear path to legalization” over six years, she said, and would provide a “robust” temporary worker program that had been scaled back by the Senate last year.
The proposed House bill also would eliminate a “punitive” judicial review process that the Senate added on the floor, Ms. Butterfield said, and offer “enforcement provisions that are pretty strong, but they smart and achievable…, using technology in a smart way, using border enforcement in a smart way and strengthening document requirements.”
Both Massachusetts senators and Rep. Frank argue that an overhaul of immigration laws should not focus solely on improving border security.
“I’m optimistic that soon we will have legislation in the Senate that strikes the right balance between protecting our security, strengthening our economy, and enacting laws that uphold our humanity,” Sen. Kennedy said. “The American people have waited long enough.”
The debate is not over whether change is needed, but what that change should be, and.
the Kennedy-Frank approach has drawn criticism from all sides of the debate.
“Currently we’re working very hard to fix” the Frank-sponsored bill, said Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, which protects and promotes the rights and opportunities of immigrants and refugees.
The organization advocates that any immigration legislation should reduce backlogs, allow for legalization of immigrants and protect all workers. “There are a number of fixes needed.”
Mr. Noorani said the bill includes a “trigger” mechanism that forces immigrants “to wait for a bureaucracy to fix itself before [they] can obtain legal status.”
“In essence, none of the legalization measures can be implemented until the enforcement measures [are implemented],” Mr. Noorani said. For example, border security measures must be implemented before any of the measures to move the legalization process forward for an immigrant can begin, he said.
Mr. Noorani also said the act should more “significantly strengthen worker protection provisions,” such as capping ever-increasing legalization fees.
He criticized the legislation for not drawing “a more clear line between the role of local police and federal police.” When local police regulate immigration, “it erodes the trust between local police and local communities,” he said, because illegal immigrants tend to not report crimes out of fear their legal status will be questioned. Mr. Noorani’s organization is also lobbying on potential Senate legislation, he said.
“Whether we’re looking at the raids [in New Bedford] or any community across the country, the fact is you have hardworking immigrants who are making small cities and towns [what they are], and our system does not allow them to emerge from the underground and get in line for citizenship,” Mr. Noorani said.
James Carafano, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, pointed to illegal activity as an indication that immigration laws are not effective.
“There [are] 15 million immigrants unlawfully living in the United States,” he said. “There are 500,000 people illegally crossing the border every year,” not to mention the backlogs of immigrants trying to become legal.
Mr. Carafano added: “There is no acceptable legislation in Congress.”
The only solution, he said, would be a combination of strengthening border security and enforcement of immigration laws to deter “people from coming in and living in the Unites States and creating legitimate legal opportunities to work in the United States.”
Furthermore, he said, any amnesty for illegal immigrants “should be off the table” because it would reward people for breaking the law.
Rep. Frank disagreed, arguing that trying to deport all of the illegal immigrants in the country would be impractical.
“Having 33,000 raids like the one we had in New Bedford is not a good idea, which is what it would take to get rid of everybody here,” he said. The solution, he added, is to “accept the people who are already here illegally but haven’t otherwise committed a crime, along with border security and better verification.”
Rep. Frank agreed that tighter border security and stronger penalties for illegal behavior are necessary. “If you’re caught crossing the border illegally, maybe the first time you get sent back, but the second time you get 60 days in jail,” he said.
“We need to put in a better tracking system of visas” as well, to deter people from coming to the United States on limited visas and then overstaying their visas, he said.
He emphasized the need for cooperation. “If we don’t all come together, we’re not going to get a good result.” he said. “Either [all of these changes] will happen or none of them will happen, and I think they will all happen.”
Mr. Noorani, for his part, said that when he thinks about the future of immigration, he thinks in days, not years.
“Quite frankly… I don’t think cities and towns across the country can weather the storm that has been caused by the type of immigration raids in New Bedford,” Mr. Noorani said.
###
WASHINGTON—When federal immigration officials stormed New Bedford’s Michael Bianco Inc. factory in early March, detaining 361 Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition illegal immigrants and arresting the company’s owner and top managers, immigration reform once again moved into the legislative spotlight.
Within days, both Massachusetts senators had declared the immigration system “broken” and vowed to support laws that would improve it.
Today, many of those detained immigrants have been released and are awaiting hearings. The future of each is unknown; some face deportation, others asylum.
The future of immigration legislation in Congress is equally unknown – but by no means stagnant.
New immigration reform bills are introduced every month in Congress by members from across the country. But many of those bills “tend to focus only on enforcement measures,” Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said. “We need to take a more comprehensive approach.”
Both Sen. Kerry and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., voted last year for a bill that would have tightened border security by increasing the number of border patrol officers, constructing additional fencing along the southern border and creating harsher penalties for the construction of illegal border tunnels.
The bill also would have expanded the number of offenses resulting in mandatory detention and deportation, increased penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants, and created a temporary guest worker program that included a path to potential legal residency.
To reduce the backlog, the bill proposed increasing the total number of immigrants allowed to gain employment and legal status.
The bill, which collapsed into another bill sponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., ultimately passed, 62-36, but died in the House Judiciary Committee before the end of the last Congress.
“Sen. Kennedy and Sen. [John] McCain [R-Ariz.] have shown the way forward towards sensible reform that provides both a path to citizenship for the illegal immigrants who are already part of the life of our communities, as well as smart, tough enforcement of our laws,” Sen. Kerry said.
Sen. Kennedy, according to his office, is negotiating the details of a new bill on the Senate side. Although the details are unknown, Sen. Kennedy has said, “Only a plan that offers a path to earned citizenship will fix our broken system.”
On the House side, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Newton, is co-sponsoring with Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., a bill that would increase the number of border and enforcement personnel, employ new unmanned aerial vehicles, cameras and sensors on the border, increase penalties for illegal immigrants within the United States, tighten employment verification standards and create a new worker visa program. The bill would also include an opportunity for earned citizenship and legalization.
The bill is not perfect, Rep. Frank said, but it does provide better solutions for the current situation.
Sen. Kennedy said he supports Frank’s bill. The support is reciprocal. “I’m really supportive of Kennedy and his approach,” Rep. Frank said.
Mr. Frank’s bill is similar to last year’s McCain-Kennedy bill before it was amended on the Senate floor. According to Jeanne Butterfield, the executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the new legislation “embraces the framework [of last year’s bill] and makes improvements to make it more workable.”
It “streamlines and simplifies” the complexities the Senate added to the bill and provides immigrants with “a very clear path to legalization” over six years, she said, and would provide a “robust” temporary worker program that had been scaled back by the Senate last year.
The proposed House bill also would eliminate a “punitive” judicial review process that the Senate added on the floor, Ms. Butterfield said, and offer “enforcement provisions that are pretty strong, but they smart and achievable…, using technology in a smart way, using border enforcement in a smart way and strengthening document requirements.”
Both Massachusetts senators and Rep. Frank argue that an overhaul of immigration laws should not focus solely on improving border security.
“I’m optimistic that soon we will have legislation in the Senate that strikes the right balance between protecting our security, strengthening our economy, and enacting laws that uphold our humanity,” Sen. Kennedy said. “The American people have waited long enough.”
The debate is not over whether change is needed, but what that change should be, and.
the Kennedy-Frank approach has drawn criticism from all sides of the debate.
“Currently we’re working very hard to fix” the Frank-sponsored bill, said Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, which protects and promotes the rights and opportunities of immigrants and refugees.
The organization advocates that any immigration legislation should reduce backlogs, allow for legalization of immigrants and protect all workers. “There are a number of fixes needed.”
Mr. Noorani said the bill includes a “trigger” mechanism that forces immigrants “to wait for a bureaucracy to fix itself before [they] can obtain legal status.”
“In essence, none of the legalization measures can be implemented until the enforcement measures [are implemented],” Mr. Noorani said. For example, border security measures must be implemented before any of the measures to move the legalization process forward for an immigrant can begin, he said.
Mr. Noorani also said the act should more “significantly strengthen worker protection provisions,” such as capping ever-increasing legalization fees.
He criticized the legislation for not drawing “a more clear line between the role of local police and federal police.” When local police regulate immigration, “it erodes the trust between local police and local communities,” he said, because illegal immigrants tend to not report crimes out of fear their legal status will be questioned. Mr. Noorani’s organization is also lobbying on potential Senate legislation, he said.
“Whether we’re looking at the raids [in New Bedford] or any community across the country, the fact is you have hardworking immigrants who are making small cities and towns [what they are], and our system does not allow them to emerge from the underground and get in line for citizenship,” Mr. Noorani said.
James Carafano, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, pointed to illegal activity as an indication that immigration laws are not effective.
“There [are] 15 million immigrants unlawfully living in the United States,” he said. “There are 500,000 people illegally crossing the border every year,” not to mention the backlogs of immigrants trying to become legal.
Mr. Carafano added: “There is no acceptable legislation in Congress.”
The only solution, he said, would be a combination of strengthening border security and enforcement of immigration laws to deter “people from coming in and living in the Unites States and creating legitimate legal opportunities to work in the United States.”
Furthermore, he said, any amnesty for illegal immigrants “should be off the table” because it would reward people for breaking the law.
Rep. Frank disagreed, arguing that trying to deport all of the illegal immigrants in the country would be impractical.
“Having 33,000 raids like the one we had in New Bedford is not a good idea, which is what it would take to get rid of everybody here,” he said. The solution, he added, is to “accept the people who are already here illegally but haven’t otherwise committed a crime, along with border security and better verification.”
Rep. Frank agreed that tighter border security and stronger penalties for illegal behavior are necessary. “If you’re caught crossing the border illegally, maybe the first time you get sent back, but the second time you get 60 days in jail,” he said.
“We need to put in a better tracking system of visas” as well, to deter people from coming to the United States on limited visas and then overstaying their visas, he said.
He emphasized the need for cooperation. “If we don’t all come together, we’re not going to get a good result.” he said. “Either [all of these changes] will happen or none of them will happen, and I think they will all happen.”
Mr. Noorani, for his part, said that when he thinks about the future of immigration, he thinks in days, not years.
“Quite frankly… I don’t think cities and towns across the country can weather the storm that has been caused by the type of immigration raids in New Bedford,” Mr. Noorani said.
###
States and Congress Discuss What’s Ahead for No Child Left Behind Reauthorization
NCLB
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Priyanka Dayal
Boston University Washington News Service
April 26, 2007
WASHINGTON, April 26 – As the landmark federal law overseeing the country’s education system comes up for reauthorization this year, the debate on accountability and the federal government’s role in local schools is resurfacing.
President Bush first talked about a No Child Left Behind law when he was running for the presidency in 2000, and a year later Congress passed it with backing from both sides of the aisle.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who disagrees with Mr. Bush on many other issues, sponsored the original bill in 2001 and is working to reauthorize it now.
As chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Mr. Kennedy has held several hearings and roundtable discussions on No Child Left Behind this year, and he will continue to hold meetings for the rest of the spring, said spokeswoman Melissa Wagoner.
Mr. Kennedy has called No Child Left Behind “a national commitment, inspired by our fundamental values and aspirations,” but he said it will not be successful without a boost in funding. Democrats led by Mr. Kennedy say Republicans have hurt schools by underfunding No Child Left Behind, but they have not signaled how much they want to increase spending.
Some Democrats say the law’s testing requirements are too constraining. And some Republicans say education policy should be left to the states. House and Senate Republicans have filed legislation that would limit the federal government’s role by letting states opt out of testing requirements but still receive federal money.
The earliest a bill might come to the floor for full debate is in the summer, Ms. Wagoner said, but it is too soon to predict what form the bill will take.
The Senate and the House must agree on the terms of reauthorization before sending a bill to President Bush for approval. The current law expires at the end of this fiscal year, on Sept. 30.
The long-term goal of No Child Left Behind is to make every child proficient in math and English language arts by 2014. But the definition of proficiency varies greatly from state to state, raising questions about the validity of state aptitude tests.
Although education standards in Massachusetts are among the highest in the country, many of the state’s schools have been identified under benchmarks set by No Child Left Behind as needing improvement.
To make sure schools are working toward the 2014 goal, they must achieve “adequate yearly progress,” which is defined at the state level. In 2006, the federal government tagged public schools in Worcester as needing improvement in English and needing corrective action in math, because many students did not meet “adequate yearly progress” goals.
Massachusetts defines proficiency by its flagship Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, which is among the most rigorous state education tests in the country. Many other states, such as Mississippi, set their standards much lower, so that on paper their students appear to be performing better. But education experts say the way No Child Left Behind ranks schools does not represent student progress accurately.
No Child Left Behind divides the student population into various subgroups based on factors such as race, skill level and income level. If a vast majority of students perform proficiently, but even one subgroup does not, a school does not meet its “adequate yearly progress” target.
The law does not distinguish between schools where only one subgroup is not performing proficiently and schools where most subgroups are not performing proficiently, which some educators think is unfair.
“Nobody can really argue with the goal that we want all children to be proficient,” said Paul Toner, vice president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. “That broad goal is something all of us can embrace.”
The Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan policy group, projects that Massachusetts is on track to achieve 100 percent proficiency by 2014.
Like most major reforms, No Child Left Behind could not have passed in Congress without bipartisan support and compromise.
But compromise brings problems, too. No Child Left Behind attempts to give states autonomy by letting them design their own methods of assessment. At the same time, it authorizes the federal government to oversee states more broadly than ever before. It also lets the federal government penalize schools that don’t perform up to standards.
“The only thing that’s federal in this is 100 percent proficiency by 2014. The federal government gave a nod to state supremacy,” said Amy Wilkins, vice president for government affairs and communications for the Education Trust, an advocacy group.
The differences in how states define their learning standards and how they design their tests can be confusing, according to Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, an education group that promotes high academic standards in states.
“We don’t know what proficiency means from state to state,” he said. “Massachusetts has rigorous but appropriate standards. It is probably among the states that is providing a more accurate and honest picture of what’s happening. In other states, students are being misled into thinking they’re doing better than they really are.”
Achieve calls the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test one of the best in the country because it measures a broad range of standards in challenging ways.
The only accurate way to compare student performance across states is through the National Assessment of Education Progress, a nationwide test administered by the U.S. Department of Education and often called the nation’s report card. In many states, students who perform well on state exams scrape by with much lower scores on the national test.
But data from the department’s National Center for Education Statistics show that average math scores in Massachusetts on the national test are consistently higher than the national averages for fourth- and eighth-graders.
No Child Left Behind rates school performance over time, but it does not track same-student performance over time. For instance, it compares how fourth graders perform in 2005 with how fourth graders perform in 2006. But it does not compare how fourth graders perform in 2005 with how they perform as fifth graders in 2006.
“We all realistically know that every child is not going to be proficient in 2014 – or any year – but if we look at the growth that we’re having and comparing them to themselves, that’s certainly a better way to see if we’re closing the achievement gap,” said Cheryl A. DelSignore, president of the Educational Association of Worcester, the local teachers’ union.
There also is some friction between state-based education initiatives and No Child Left Behind mandates, according to John F. “Jack” Jennings, president of the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, an advocacy group.
“Massachusetts law is more geared to getting students to pass a state test to graduate from high school, whereas with the federal test, there’s annual accountability,” he said.
Whether or not they support the No Child Left Behind law, educators seem to agree that the goals are unattainable without a hike in funding.
About 50 percent of the money for No Child Left Behind comes from the state and about 40 percent comes from school districts, according to Mr. Jennings. Less than 10 percent comes from the federal government.
James A. Caradonio, superintendent of Worcester public schools, said the federal government and the state are “giving us less money to [achieve] higher standards with more kids.”
State education dollars have been dwindling in Massachusetts. Mr. Caradonio said the district’s budget has been cut six years in a row, while the costs of running the school system have skyrocketed.
He said he supports No Child Left Behind because without such a goal, “we would never change.” But he also called the law “a hodgepodge of ideas thrown together because of compromise” rather than research.
In addition to increasing accountability for student performance, the law is designed to close the achievement gap between privileged and underprivileged students, improve teacher quality, increase parental choice and reduce bureaucracy in the education system.
“The law is extremely ambitious,” Mr. Jennings said. “Yet the resources are less today than they were 10 years ago, and most districts in the country are getting the same or less money than they got last year.”
Even though the law stresses the importance of educating children with disabilities or other challenges, educators in Worcester say those students are getting left behind.
Schools strapped for cash have had to increase class size, so students with disabilities or limited English skills are not getting the attention they need, said Ms. DelSignore, who represents Worcester teachers.
Mr. Toner, who also represents teachers, agreed that the federal law is “too constraining.”
“More and more teachers report that all they’re doing is testing,” he said.
Schools are forced to put their resources into teaching math and English education, which are monitored by No Child Left Behind, while art, science and physical education programs have suffered, he added.
But Ms. Wilkins, of the Education Trust, said if educators are struggling to have all students reach proficiency, it’s because they are “conditioned to expect failure” from students with disabilities or from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The goals are “absolutely realistic,” she said, but “some principals and teachers are making bad decisions about how to get kids there.”
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Breast Cancer – Fighting For a Cure
CANCER
New Hampshire Union Leader
Alyssa Marcus
Boston University Washington News Service
April 26, 2007
WASHINGTON, April 26 – A breast cancer diagnosis a few decades ago was a very different experience than it is today. Times have changed, and so has this disease that used to not leave much choice for the women involved, and was often a death sentence as well.
“The reality is that every year the drugs get better and chemo gets easier,” said Katie Paine of Durham, whose cancer has been in remission for more than three years.
But obstacles remain for breast cancer treatments, which is why breast cancer survivors and their allies deployed in late April to Capitol Hill to lobby Congress.
Rebecca Gray, the former president of the Vermont-New Hampshire affiliate board of “Susan G. Komen for the Cure,” a breast cancer foundation that is celebrating its 25th year, joined other representatives in taking their message to members of Congress.
Gray, a breast cancer survivor of 10 years, said there are four specific issues that the foundation is lobbying for. The first is to have Congress fully fund the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, an allocation of $225 million for the next fiscal year. This program, established in 1991, provides low-income and uninsured women with access to services for early detection. Currently, the funding for this program is $204 million.
The foundation also is requesting that Congress spend $5.8 billion for the National Cancer Institute for 2008, or at least a minimum of $5.1 billion, which would be an increase of approximately six percent from the last fiscal year.
The third issue is Patient Navigator Services, a program that helps patients who may have barriers such as language or being uninsured to “navigate” their way through the system of getting breast cancer care, including hospitals, insurance and support organizations. The legislation for this, which authorized $25 million over five years, was passed in 2005. But so far, no funds have been appropriated for the services.
Finally the group is lobbying Congress to amend a 2000 to make more women eligible for care.
Gray said that in Vermont and New Hampshire, the women who fall through the cracks are low-income women. “In lower-income areas of New Hampshire, like the Claremont area, the death rate is much higher than in other areas of New Hampshire,” she said.
For the women who are lucky enough to receive treatment, there are many ways to treat breast cancer, and the treatment a woman receives depends on many variables.
Jacqui Bryan of Rye, whose cancer has been in remission for almost four years, said that one of the best advances in breast cancer treatments is discovering the different “personalities” of tumors.
“What they do is they look at the personality of the tumor and they determine the treatment based on the personality of the tumor,” she said.
Because of this focus on tumor “personality,” Paine and Bryan got different treatments because their diagnoses, although both breast cancer, were not the same.
Until the 1950s, breast cancer treatment consisted of mastectomy, the removal of the entire breast. The lumpectomy, an alternative method that removes the cancer from the breast, was developed and by the late 1980s it—along with radiation—was the standard treatment, according to Dr. Katherine Alley, medical director of the Suburban Breast Center in Maryland
Chemotherapy has also been used since the 1960s. There have been other advances since then, including a number of drugs likeTamoxifen that have been developed over the last 20 years, Alley said.
“In the past five to seven years, aromatase inhibitors have also been a big advancement,” Alley said. “Also, the newer drug Herceptin has now been around for five to seven years.”
A large part of cancer funding goes towards clinical trials. Paine participated in one as part of her treatment. She took the drug Xeloda, which was being tested as a substitute for Taxol, a common chemotherapy drug. The doctors administering the trial kept track of the results, and so far she said, the only difference between her and other women whose cancer is in remission is that she sees her doctor every six months, rather than once a year.
In terms of the alternate drug being the better one, Paine is not sure. “You don’t know until it doesn’t come back for five years,” she says. “But it was easier because it was a shorter period of time, and frankly, what they were trying to see too was what the side effects were, and I did have some side effects… and that tells them something.”
Although Bryan did not participate in a clinical trial as part of her treatment, she did receive the latest in breast cancer treatments, which is a chemotherapy regimen called Dose Dense. The difference between this regimen and the normal one is that with Dose Dense the patient goes in for chemotherapy sessions every two weeks instead of every three. It was relatively new when Bryan was being treated, but it’s now much more common. Shannon Morin of Milford also did Dose Dense only six months ago.
Of course, these advances in treatment have not come without a cost – literally: According to the National Cancer Institute’s Web site, cancer prevention and control would get $572 million in the proposed 2008 budget, which would be an increase of approximately 10 percent from 2007.
Alan Eastman, professor of toxicology and pharmacology at Dartmouth, said there is not enough money for cancer research. “Only ten percent of requests get funded,” he said. “The money has dried up, gone towards other resources. There are too many good ideas going to waste at the moment because there isn’t enough money.”
Paine, Bryan and Morin, three women who have gone through treatment for this disease, agree on two things. One is the fact that doing these tests on women of a variety of ages is a major factor in helping to find new treatments and, eventually, a cure.
“We don’t have much research for people in their 20s and 30s,” Morin said. “Right now, when I talk to doctors, I’m kind of in a gray area because they don’t know much about this age range.” Morin was 27 years old when her cancer was diagnosed in August 2006.
The other is the importance of being proactive. “It can strike at any age,” Bryan said. “It’s not a menopausal woman’s problem anymore. It can strike young, so be aware.”
And early detection is key, Alley said. “The most important thing about curing breast cancer is early diagnosis.”
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Frank and New Bedford Fishermen Demand Improved Safety FISHING
FISHING
New Bedford Standard Times
Valerie Sullivan
Boston University Washington News Service
April 25, 2007
WASHINGTON, April 25 —In a hearing Wednesday on Capitol Hill, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Debra M. Shrader, executive director of the non-profit commercial fishermen’s advocacy group Shore Support Inc. in New Bedford, called for improved regulations of fishing safety.
“Fisherman have voluntarily taken on one of the most dangerous jobs in America,” Rep. Frank said.
He acknowledged the inevitability of tragedy among fisherman. “But we can do better,” he said.
Ms. Shrader has a special interest in the regulations, because her husband, Ronnie Shrader, is a scallop boat captain.
“There are some things about industrial fishing that [fishermen and their wives] know are matters of nature and man that we cannot impact,” she said. “I know each time we embrace each other for that last hug when we say goodbye, it could be the very last hug.”
But there are ways to decrease those risks, she said.
In her testimony before the House Transportation Committee’s Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation subcommittee, Ms. Shrader emphasized safety training, dockside and vessel inspections, and captains’ certification.
Rep. Frank also called for such changes.
In his testimony he outlined a series of recommended changes, including a fully-funded volunteer training program, increased funds to open up communication with the Coast Guard, expansion of dockside inspection, a vessel monitoring system, safety standards for smaller vessels and logging of monthly fishing vessel drills.
Rep. Steven LaTourette, R-Ohio, who is the senior Republican on the subcommittee, echoed Rep. Frank’s concern about “this whole notion of the tension between safety” and prosperity, citing the conflict when fishermen must decide whether to turn around and go back to shore due to bad weather and choose to lose a day of fishing, or face inclement – and often dangerous – weather to hold onto the prospect of earning their livelihood that day.
Not all subcommittee members insisted on immediate changes. Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., told one committee witness, “My fear is if Congress overreacts…. I know the consequences of overregulation.” He said he feared a backlash in the future, leading to a lack of regulation in response.
Most of the hearing, however, emphasized the need for improved safety regulations and methods by which to achieve them.
The North East has experienced its share of fishing vessel tragedies in recent years. On Dec. 4, 2004, the fishing vessel Northern Edge sank about 45 miles off Nantucket, killing five. In January of this year, four fishermen were lost in the New Bedford vessel Lady of Grace. In February, two were missing after the Newburyport-based fishing vessel Lady Luck disappeared 12 miles off the coast of Maine.
Kennedy Chief of Staff’s Passion for Public Service Began In New Bedford
MOGILNICKI
The New Bedford Standard-Times
Valerie Sullivan
Boston University Washington News Service
April 25, 2007
WASHINGTON, April 25 —Eric Mogilnicki spent the summer of 1982 in grocery store parking lots, urging voters to support Rep. Gerry E. Studds, D-Mass., by sporting a Studds bumper sticker on their cars.
One evening that summer, Mr. Mogilnicki and fellow campaigner Kevin Gallagher, both in their early 20s, attended a debate between Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Sen. Gordon Humphrey, R-N.H., at Harvard University.
“There we were in our suits, with sunburn from spending the day out in a parking lot,” Mr. Gallagher said.
The ride back to New Bedford was filled with an elated discussion of Sen. Kennedy’s impressive oratory and debate skills, Mr. Gallagher said. “Kevin and I were both deeply impressed by Sen. Kennedy’s eloquence and understanding of the issue,” Mr. Mogilnicki said.
Today, Mr. Mogilnicki is 46 and chief of staff to Sen. Kennedy. “I can scarcely believe 25 years have gone by since [then],” he said.
Mr. Mogilnicki’s hair may be gray now, but his passion for public service has never faded. “Sen. Kennedy was my hero of my childhood,” he said. “So coming to work with him was a dream come true.”
Mr. Mogilnicki grew up in the North End of New Bedford, where he was raised in a close-knit Democratic family, along with his two brothers, Robert and Stephen, who are now schoolteachers and live in suburbs of New Bedford. His father, Robert, who passed away in 2005, was a professor at Bridgewater State College. His mother, Georgette, worked as a teacher and then head of the Lower School at Friends Academy in Dartmouth, and still lives in New Bedford for part of the year.
“I had a wonderful childhood in New Bedford,” Mr. Mogilnicki said, recalling memories of Horseneck Beach, Buttonwood Park Zoo and coffee frappes at Frates Dairy.
Following elementary and middle school in New Bedford and high school at Friends Academy in Dartmouth, Mr. Mogilnicki attended Yale University. During college, he interned for Rep. Studds. When Rep. Studds won reelection, Mogilnicki joined his Washington staff as legislative assistant.
“I loved being down here,” he said. “Young people in Washington can do a tremendous amount of good.”
Mr. Mogilnicki returned to Yale for law school in 1983, and after graduating accepted a job as assistant attorney general under then-Massachusetts Attorney General James Shannon.
“As soon as I was done with [law school], I was back in public service again,” he said. “I was very proud to be an attorney general in the Massachusetts office. I had the opportunity to argue before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts several times.”
After his work in the attorney general’s office, Mr. Mogilnicki in 1991 joined a law firm in Washington. When Sen. Kennedy was looking for a chief of staff at the beginning of 2006, mutual acquaintances suggested Mr. Mogilnicki, who was both dedicated to public service and had ties to Massachusetts.
“For me, growing up in New Bedford, the idea that I could get to work 10 feet from Sen. Kennedy is just a remarkable honor.”
Mr. Mogilnicki and his wife, Peggy Dotzel, met while they were working at the law firm in Washington. They live in suburban Maryland with their two children, Annie, 8, and Sam, 6, but Massachusetts is “the place he still considers his home state,” Ms. Dotzel said.
Ms. Dotzel, who grew up in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., has found her husband’s love of New Bedford and Massachusetts contagious. “We go up there for family visits several times a year…. It’s been fun for me,” she said.
Son Sam is a fan of New England sports teams – even those he hasn’t seen – and daughter Annie “loves being up in Cape Cod or Horseneck. They know that they have a home away from home [in Massachusetts],” Mr. Mogilnicki said.
In addition to his love of Massachusetts, Mr. Mogilnicki’s passion for politics also has affected his children.
“I feel like I’m instilling in them some of the values that my parents instilled in me, that I’m helping them understand the way the world works… in a way that I hope means that they’ll be dedicated to trying to make the world a better place,” Mr. Mogilnicki said.
“He’s met my kids and he’s wonderful with them,” Mr. Mogilnicki said of Sen. Kennedy. “When it’s my birthday, he’s the one who leads the singing of Happy Birthday around the cake…. He’s terrific about thanking people, acknowledging their contributions, and he’s just fun to be around.”
If you listened to Mr. Mogilnicki, you would think his job was all good. But Tamera Luzzatto, chief of staff to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., knows well the challenges of such a position.
“There’s a saying that current chiefs of staffs don’t say ‘Congratulations’ to new chiefs of staffs. They say, ‘I’m sorry.’ ” she said.
But Mr. Mogilnicki is well-equipped for the challenge, she said. After working with him on issues both senators were involved with, Ms. Luzzatto said, “He can both be very aggressive and intense in the best sense of the word.” She said he also “is one of these people comfortable being friendly and warm.”
But the bottom line, Ms. Luzzatto said, is “if you work for Sen. Kennedy, you… work hard…. It’s a big order to fill to manage his operation in the Senate.”
Mr. Mogilnicki’s daily tasks include answering “the hundreds and hundreds of e-mails [Sen. Kennedy] gets,” briefing the senator on daily issues, previewing memos going to the senator’s desk and coordinating projects with both the Washington staff and people in Massachusetts.
In Mr. Mogilnicki’s words—“to make sure that the trains are all running on time and not crashing.”
His younger brother Stephen Mogilnicki said his brother is up to the challenge.
“From a very early age, Eric’s been an incredibly hardworking, dedicated individual who has always had extremely high standards for himself and has always been willing to give back to others in need,” he said Stephen Mogilnicki.
Peggy Dotzel said her husband is very fortunate and knows it. “I firmly believe…that not everybody gets the opportunity do something that is so near and dear to their heart,” she said.
“I know this has been the job of my lifetime,” Mr. Mogilnicki said, “and I’ll probably feel that way even 20 years from now.”
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Controversy Over Bill Aimed at Helping Veterans
Veterans
New Hampshire Union Leader
Greg Hellman
Boston University Washington News Service
4/25/07
WASHINGTON, April 25 —Tales of bureaucratic nightmares at veterans’ hospitals throughout the country in recent months have prompted a flurry of legislation on Capitol Hill aimed at providing relief to veterans.
Amid the maelstrom of activity, a wide-ranging piece of legislation intended to expand access to health care in an unprecedented fashion for veterans is being greeted, however, with mixed responses.
The Veterans Health Care Empowerment Act, which Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) introduced on March 8 and which is scheduled for hearings before the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee late next month, would allow veterans with service-connected disabilities to obtain treatment at almost any medical facility in the nation.
The only requirement would be that the facility be authorized to receive payments under Medicare or TRICARE, the military health system.
Under the act, “veterans are empowered to seek care at the place they believe will provide them with the best service, the best quality and the best access,” Sen. Craig said in a statement.
And while the bill is beginning to pick up traction among influential Senate Republicans, it is also being met with resistance from the American Legion, the nation’s largest veterans’ service organization, which fears it would bury the already cash-strapped Department of Veterans Affairs under an even greater financial burden.
In New Hampshire, where the state’s only VA hospital, in Manchester, discontinued primary care seven years ago, however, industry workers and veterans alike are cautiously praising the bill as a promising solution to a growing crisis in health care access.
Since its introduction, the bill has picked up three Republican co-sponsors, including Sens. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Ted Stevens of Alaska. New Hampshire Sens. Judd Gregg and John Sununu also have expressed their support for the legislation.
“There is no question that top-notch treatment is available through the existing VA system, but in New Hampshire, many veterans live a significant distance from the closest VA medical facility,” Sununu said in a statement. “We should take every reasonable step to ensure these veterans have convenient access to care, and the Veterans Health Care Empowerment Act would help cut red tape that prevents them from receiving treatment closer to home.”
Discussion of the bill comes as a nine-member presidential commission headed by former Sen. Robert Dole and former of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala investigate veterans’ health care problems.
And while all three co-sponsors praised the VA health care system as “among the best in the nation” and said they did not expect a mass exodus from the current system, they insisted that the bill is about giving veterans choices.
“While I have great faith in quality of care available from the VA, I know some veterans are concerned,” Isakson said. “I believe this legislation will ensure that those individuals have additional options.”
But Paul Morin, the American Legion national commander, in a strongly worded March 22 letter written to both Sen. Craig and Sen. Daniel Akaka, chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, warned that the proposed legislation would in fact “inevitably lead to the complete dissolution of the VA health care system.”
The letter said the bill would present problems similar to that of Medicare, calling it both a financial burden unless payment caps were added and an invitation for abuse and fraud. The Congressional Budget Office has not yet completed a cost estimate.
“We’re not sure this is going to provide the best health care for rural veterans,” Steve Robertson, director of legislative affairs for the American Legion, said. “In utopia it would work great, but in reality there needs to be limits placed on it.”
For Army National Guard sergeant and Iraq War veteran Trina Wycoff of Allenstown, the half-hour drive to the Manchester VA medical center is not unreasonable. She must take off work to make her appointments but, she concedes, she is within driving distance to receive her medical care.
Many New Hampshire veterans are not as lucky as Wycoff, however. They either live in the North Country hours away from Manchester or are in need of a full-service hospital, and they face tremendous obstacles to accessing health care. For in-patient care and other treatments unavailable at the Manchester VA medical center, the facility must shuttle patients to medical centers in Massachusetts.
Even veterans using services in Manchester, however, face problems of access. Wycoff recalled witnessing an older veteran during one of her visits ask an attendant how he could possibly get to his home in northern New Hampshire after spending his entire day in Manchester. After he received little help from the staff, Wycoff volunteered to give him a ride.
“He had no way of getting home,” she said. “His day had started at 6 in the morning. For many people you can’t come all the way down here, spend a whole day in Manchester and find your way back.”
Mary Morin, director of the New Hampshire State Veterans Council, said that increased access to medical facilities “might streamline veterans from North Country who have difficulty coming down to Manchester. Any time you can get health care to the veterans it’s a good thing.”
While the proposed legislation might help veterans stranded hours away from care receive treatment at their local hospitals, it also would risk taking them away from experts trained to treat injuries unique to returning veterans, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, said Dr. Setin Savage, president of the New Hampshire Medical Society and independent consultant to the Manchester VA.
“There are a limited number of health care facilities for veterans in New England so anything that improves access to quality medical care is something we support,” Savage said. “But you can’t just assume that community providers are as prepared as veteran centers. They don’t have as much experience” in treating combat-related injuries.
Though the fate of the Veterans Health Care Empowerment Act is uncertain, veterans’ advocates are happy finally to see legislators begin to take action.
“Something needs to change within the VA system,” Savage said. “What the bill at least does is create innovative approaches to examine the system.”
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Prospects for Stepped-Up Sub Production Dim
SUBS
The New London Day
Renée Dudley
Boston University Washington News Service
April 25, 2007
WASHINGTON, April 25 —The “silent service” may be too silent for its own good, as the debate continues over increasing and speeding up production of the newest class of Navy submarines.
The dispute over advancing the 2012 target date for doubling the rate at which the new Virginia-class attack submarines are built involves questions of cost, parochialism within the Navy and, especially, the military role of the underwater fleet.
The usefulness of the American submarine fleet has been called into question at least in part because its missions remain almost wholly unknown to the public at large. They involve mainly intelligence gathering operations, defense experts say. But some analysts say that port surveillance via a periscope is not a good enough reason to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on an additional submarine each year.
Other defense experts say additional submarine procurement is absolutely vital to national security. But even while arguing for the importance of a strong and stealthy submarine fleet, they acknowledge that spending on the Iraq War renders quickened submarine procurement virtually impossible.
Currently, one Virginia-class submarine is being built each year, with production split in alternating years between shipyards in Groton and Newport News, Va.
The Navy had originally been scheduled to begin producing two Virginia-class submarines per year in 2002. President Bush’s most recent budget proposal calls for a second such submarine to be built each year starting in fiscal year 2012.
However, John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank, predicted that stepped-up production will be indefinitely stalled. “They’re going to be stuck at one a year for a while,” he said. “It’s a combination of competing priorities, plus nobody can explain what these submarines do. What subs do is all highly classified, so it’s hard to prove their usefulness. It’s just hard to describe their utility relative to other things at present.”
Pike added that although he does not expect production to move to two a year, he also does not expect it to dip below one a year.
“It’s the silent service, but their silence is not serving them at this point,” Pike said.
“When sealift people come in, they can tell you a story – they’ve got a whole song and dance they can give you about operational maneuvers on the sea.” By contrast, he said, “missions that submariners can discuss do not arouse a great deal of enthusiasm.”
During World War II and the Cold War, he said, submarines had definite missions that could be understood by the public-- to sink enemy ships and protect the American surface fleet. “But when the Cold War ended, subs were relegated to the ‘nice to have’ category.”
Former Connecticut Rep. Rob Simmons, an ardent supporter of expanding the naval submarine fleet, disagreed, saying “national security is not about telling stories to the media.”
He continued: “People in the Navy, Pentagon, White House and Congress have security clearances, and just because you can’t talk about these issues in public doesn’t mean they’re not important or that they lack clearly defined missions.”
A lack of clearly understood objectives is not the only reason that additional Virginia-class procurement is likely to be stalled. Some defense analysts say that within the Navy itself the submarine fleet, the smallest division, is the lowest “caste”.
Some of these analysts argue that the underwater fleet is being sidelined by high-ranking surface warfare officers who prefer to steer federal funds to programs that will help their own division.
Chris Griffin, an Asia defense analyst for the conservative American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, warned that this could lead to a serious breach of national security.
Last November, for example, a Chinese Song-class submarine surfaced within five miles of the USS Kitty Hawk, an aircraft carrier, an event, Griffin said, that surprised the defense community. “It is possible Chinese capabilities are greater than we expected,” he said. “There’s no indication the Chinese submarine threat is going to dissipate in the foreseeable future.”
Griffin said that in the Chinese navy the role of the submarine fleet is considered to be of the highest importance. In fact, he said, a submariner is on the senior military commission of the People’s Liberation Army.
In the U.S. Navy the surface fleet generally takes top priority, and submariners are underrepresented in the highest ranks of the Navy, which has not seen a submariner as Chief of Naval Operations in recent memory.
“It shows that submarines have pride of place when it comes to Chinese naval policy,” Griffin said. “And whoever has the strongest voice on policy has the strongest voice on procurement”
To Griffin, “it’s evident that it is in America’s interests to bolster sub capabilities.” He said the U.S. Navy should have learned “clear lessons” from history when confronting China’s “asymmetric” fleet. The 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, in which American surface warfare vessels were open targets for bombing by the Japanese, should have made it evident, he said, that “sub procurement shouldn’t be a debate, but a concern.”
But the Navy doesn’t carry all of the blame, said Loren Thompson, director of security studies at the conservative Lexington Institute. Congress made the decision to split production of the Virginia-class submarine between General Dynamics Corp.’s Electric Boat in Groton and Northrop Grumman Corp.’s Newport News facility.
In 1993, the Clinton administration attempted to have each facility concentrate on one type of submarine, but the Virginia congressional delegation argued that specialization would destroy competition. “If we [had] stuck with this plan,” Thompson said, “there wouldn’t be a problem” of cost.
The Virginia-class sub, originally designed to be a less-costly version of the Seawolf attack submarine, is becoming, in fact, more expensive than the Seawolf.
Congress and the Navy have put pressure on the shipbuilding industry to get down to the least-costly model possible. The Navy said it could fund two Virginia-class submarines a year in 2012 only if Electric Boat and the Newport News shipyard would be able to produce the vessels below a certain cost.
Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) said the debate over the split production process is “not productive to revisit that at this time,” even though it is proving to be costlier than production at a single shipyard. “Taxpayers should feel good that Electric Boat and the Virginia shipyard have been listening to the Navy’s demands” to keep costs down, he said, noting the importance of achieving economies of scale. But even greater economies of scale would result from the building of two Virginia-class subs a year, Courtney said in February.
Bob Hamilton, spokesman for Electric Boat, said increasing submarine production would make Groton’s workforce more efficient. At the current schedule of one Virginia-class submarine per year, Electric Boat actually delivers one submarine every other year, while Newport News delivers ships in the alternating years. “As a result, our staffing requirements vary by 500 to 1,500 people annually,” Hamilton said, noting that when production is increased, labor costs will decline and overhead costs will be spread over a larger business base.
Steven Kosiak, vice president for budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan policy research group, said the argument that producing two submarines a year would achieve economies of scale is sound, but not feasible for everyone. “You can make that argument with all kinds of programs, but you can’t make everyone produce at their maximum efficiency rate,” he said. “If you add money to one program to increase efficient production rate, you take it away from another.”
But the need for a bigger submarine fleet is urgent, some defense analysts say.
“Subs are going to be more survivable than any other warship in the fleet,” Thompson said, adding that most people would not consider him a strong submarine advocate. In today’s Navy, submarines are charged primarily with collecting intelligence and carrying out reconnaissance missions in the Persian Gulf, the eastern Mediterranean Sea and southeast and northeast Asia. “Intelligence-gathering is one of the ways subs will become more relevant in the future,” Thompson said. “The question is, where are we going to find the money?”
“We’ll need more in the future than we have now because it’s unclear if surface ships are going to be able to operate in places like China,” Thompson said. “Are we going to put aircraft carriers in the Taiwan Strait 20 years from now?” he questioned, noting that destroyers and aircraft carriers will more vulnerable than submarines. “The Navy has stopped thinking seriously about the future,” he said.
The United States, he cautioned, could soon face a serious national security shortfall.
“We’re headed for a [submarine] fleet of less than 50,” he said. “Half those boats won’t be available; they’ll be in repair, transit or training. That leaves you with about two dozen subs to cover the whole world, and that is not enough for defense in Europe or Asia.”
He added: “If we ever have to face another threat, we’ll have to go to underwater warfare--and we won’t have enough subs to do that.”
Courtney said that “at the pace we’re going, starting in 2015, the fleet is going to be inadequate to address our national security needs. It’s not a coincidence that the original plan to build two submarines a year starting in 2002 has been pushed back to 2012. Funding is being cannibalized because of the war in Iraq.”
The Defense Department ‘s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, a comprehensive examination of national security requirements, set as a specific goal the “return to a steady-state production rate of two attack submarines per year not later than 2012.” In addition, the Navy has said it needs a minimum of 48 submarines in its fleet. Unless submarine production is increased, it cannot maintain that number, given that some vessels will be decommissioned, while others will be in port for repair.
Thompson said that although he thinks the government is already spending too much money on the military, the Navy needs to procure two submarines a year starting in 2010 instead of 2012. “And to maintain a rational and efficient schedule, we’d build all boats at Electric Boat,” he said.
Harlan Ullman, a specialist at the Center for Naval Analysis and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said Congress will simply refuse to appropriate federal funds for two submarines a year because of ongoing costs incurred by the war in Iraq. “The Navy’s fiscal problem is the problem each of the services faces,” he said. “We have plans for 30 to 50 percent more stuff than we’re going to be able to buy, plus repairing the stuff that is being worn out in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Ullman warned that “unless Congress is prepared to spend more, you have an implosion coming, and there will have to be draconian cuts. “But in the past we have divided those cuts so each branch has suffered more or less the same.”
“In the case of China emerging as a potential threat, we have time to re-gear,” Ullman said. “People have to expect a huge compression inside the U.S. military, which could even mean going to one submarine yard.”
But Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces, disagreed, saying time is of the essence. “When a conflict starts, you don’t have any time – you have to do it in advance.”
Courtney added: “China is spending a lot of money on their military, and their Navy is getting most of it.” He said the Chinese Navy is building submarines at a rate of two-and-a-half a year. “Today we’re fine, but in 2015, who knows what the world’s going to be like?”
Advocates for accelerated procurement say that the existing underwater fleet is already overbooked with mission requests, even with a fleet that has what the Navy calls a number of vessels adequate for maintaining a moderate level of national security.
Former Rep. Simmons said that even with the current fleet of 54 fast attack submarines, the Navy still failed to fulfill nearly 40 percent of its top-priority missions. “It’s a serious national security issue,” he said. “The surface fleet was able to meet 100 percent of their requirements – yet more investments continue to be made in surface ships.”
The Navy denied hundreds of requests for intelligence collection last year because there were not enough vessels to fulfill the demands, Thompson said. “More than 300 days of intelligence collection were not served because they didn’t have enough subs that could go where they were requested,” he said.
But GlobalSecurity.org director Pike said this was not a good enough argument for increased procurement. “They talk about how they’re oversubscribed, but it’s easy to be oversubscribed when it’s a free commodity,” he said. “It’s trivially easy to churn out massive collection requests with no great effort.”
Pike added that he questions submarines’ effectiveness as information gatherers. “It’s less than evident to me that periscope depth is the best method for collecting intelligence,” he said. “If you took the money spent on subs and gave it to the intelligence community, would they turn around and spend it on subs? Probably not.”
Robert Work, vice president for strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said increasing production was not a question of capacity or requirements. “The only thing in debate is how soon you should move,” he said.
“There are significant congressional interests to do this and significant Navy desires not to do it,” Work said. “What comes out of the budget deliberations I rate as a coin toss.”
Although the House Armed Services Committee supports the advanced procurement of a second Virginia-class submarine, legislation must still be approved in the Senate. Seapower Subcommittee chairman Taylor said his Senate counterpart, Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has been a supporter of stepped-up procurement of the submarine.
Courtney said Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) have supported increased procurement before 2012.
In the House, Taylor’s subcommittee is scheduled to begin work on legislation the week of April 30. The full committee is expected to act in mid-June.
Both Taylor and Courtney express confidence that the House committee will approve the bill.
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Wounded Warriors Caught in Medical Bureaucracy
DISABILITY
Bangor Daily News
Carlene Olsen
Boston University Washington News Service
4/25/07
WASHINGTON, April 25– Service Officer Rene Deschene advises military men and women with amputated limbs, post traumatic stress and injuries invisible to the naked eye in the Veterans of Foreign Wars office at the Togus VA Medical Center in Augusta.
Soldiers returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan are common clients in his office as are those who served in Vietnam more than 30 years ago. But these men and women do not come to see Deschene to discuss their ailments or mental flashbacks.
Patients turn to him for guidance through a system that can seem as complex and daunting to newcomers as the first day of boot camp – the bureaucracy of military health care. Many who pay Deschene a visit are in the midst of medical and physical evaluations required to receive disability ratings for service compensation.
Disability ratings—on a zero to 100 percent scale—are assigned to wounded service members. The ratings determine whether members get medical retirement and what disability payments they will receive after they are discharged from military medical care.
The Department of Veterans Affairs uses the rating system to determine for each veteran what service related health issues will be covered by its facilities. Though VA facilities use the same guidelines that are used by military facilities to determine an individual’s overall rating, the measures can vary drastically between the two systems.
Rating discrepancies between military and VA facilities occur because of the differing focus each places on medical and physical evaluations, officials from the VA and Department of Defense said.
Inside the Medical Bureaucracy
Sgt. 1st Class Brian Levensailor, an outpatient at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington from Guilford, Maine, started his disability rating process in early March after several months of medical care at the facility and said he has yet to receive his initial claim recommendation.
Levensailor, who has been in the military for 24 years and served in Afghanistan, shows few signs of physical injuries upon first glance. He said he hopes to receive a Pentagon rating above 30 percent enabling him to take medical retirement, though he fears he may receive one much lower. Soldiers rated below 30 percent, who choose not to appeal, receive severance compensation without additional benefits.
“I’ve been told my injuries are degenerative in nature because I have arthritis now [from previous war injuries in Afghanistan],” Levensailor said. “The Army doesn’t seem to care that I have arthritis from aging in the service – not just from aging.”
The Department of Defense determines if a person is fit or unfit for military duty according to his or her physical and mental health and assigns a rating based on that standard. The VA evaluates the well being of the person regardless of his or her ability to continue military service, taking into account even minor health concerns, which often results in a higher rating estimate.
Soldiers can appeal their rating but risk receiving a lower score. Rating changes often occur when new medical records are brought before the board, Col. Andy Buchanan, U.S. Army deputy commanding officer of the Physical Disability Agency at Walter Reed said. If a rating is lowered it may be the result of a recent evaluation where the individual performed better than he or she had on the same exam in the past, he said.
“Rather than the government doing what is in the best interest of the soldier and determining what is going to yield the best outcome, the medical care does a disservice,” Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) said in a phone interview.
Because of the influx of returning wounded Iraqi war vets, older Vietnam pension claims are backlogged.
“We have made [Operation Iraqi Freedom] claims a priority within the VA process because those returning from combat have a significant need for a rating,” said James Whitson, director of VA benefits for 16 New England regional offices, including Togus.
Currently, those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan represent 8 to 10 percent of pending VA disability claims, Whitson said.
“The older vets are being pushed behind for treatment now that the [Iraq] service members are coming home,” Deschene said.
Soldier Advocates
Deschene and other service officers from veterans’ organizations throughout the state serve as resources for soldiers receiving VA medical care at Togus. But those awaiting disability ratings at military hospitals, such as Walter Reed, lack a strong network of on-site soldier advocates, according to critics of the system.
At Togus service officers, such as Deschene, are paid by their affiliate veteran’s organization, not the hospital.
“The department service officer is the only person legally able to represent a veteran and present a [disability] claim to the VA,” said James Bachelder, senior vice commander of the Maine Veterans of Foreign Wars. “They go through much training to do so.”
Without soldier advocates to advise them, some service members in military care are unaware of the various options for their service pay and what might be most beneficial to them, making the transition into VA care and civilian life increasingly difficult.
Although soldiers in military facilities are assigned case managers by the Department of Defense for help with medical appointments and care, most case managers lack in-depth knowledge of the disability rating system. Some soldiers settle on disability claims unaware of other options because they lack guidance, Levensailor said.
Disability Evaluations
Medical injuries and illness deeply rooted in a soldier’s past can affect medical and physical service evaluations in military and VA facilities, Buchanan of Walter Reed said.
But some soldiers interpret low ratings given for various reasons as the Army’s attempt to save money.
“The ultimate goal seems to be to put everybody out that [the military] can without medically retiring them,” Levensailor said. “Medical retirees’ pay comes out of the Army budget, so if soldiers are pushed out onto VA, then they receive VA compensation out of the VA budget.”
Buchanan said the Physical Evaluation Board follows strict guidelines used by all military service branches to ensure each soldier is accurately and fairly assessed.
Two-thirds of the service members evaluated by the Department of Defense have muscular and skeletal injuries that often result in a disability rating below 30 percent based on their determined fitness for duty, Buchanan said.
According to data from the Physical Evaluation Board, on average, 20 percent of evaluated soldiers received disability ratings each fiscal year that made them eligible for medical retirement.
“We are stringent about treating everybody fairly and equally,” Buchanan said. “A bullet doesn’t discriminate, so we don’t want to discriminate between injuries.”
Legislation
The Wounded Warrior Act, introduced in March and currently under consideration in the Senate, would address many of the concerns raised by soldiers in military care, Snowe said.
Under the act, stricter routine inspections in military facilities would be enforced and additional services would be available to those in care, easing the transition into VA services.
“There are no advocates for the soldiers and I think that is a very important assessment we need to act upon,” Snowe said.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said in a phone interview that providing additional resources for soldiers in these facilities rivals the urgency of increasing hospital staff.
“Waiting times [for disability ratings] are far too long,” Collins said.
The Next Step
Changes to the medical system are underway and the processing time for disability claims has improved in the past few months, though the quality of medical care remains consistent, Buchanan said.
The Army released a pocket booklet the last week of April outlining the disability rating process, which will be distributed to service members at Walter Reed and military facilities throughout the country, he said. The booklet serves as a reference point for soldiers at various stages of the rating process.
Buchanan also said Physical Evaluation Board members from each service branch are expected to convene at the beginning of May to determine why the number of Army medical retirees is lower than that in other service branches when the same rating schedule is used to evaluate disability claims.
“All but two of my physicians on the Physical Evaluation Board [who assess soldiers for disability claims] are retired military,” Buchanan said. “They understand where these guys are coming from and they treat all equally in their evaluations.”
Collins, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said there is a lot of work underway at the Pentagon and in Congress to assess the disability rating system and reform military health care.
“I am very concerned that transition between the military healthcare system and the VA system is a confusing bureaucracy for far too many injured veterans,” Collins said. “That really troubles me.”
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Home Sweet (Affordable) Home: Reforms Proposed for Section 8
SECTION8
Keene Sentinel
Jessica Arriens
Boston University Washington News Service
24 April 2007
WASHINGTON, April 24—Since 1937, the pursuit of affordable homes for low-income families has been a continually evolving federal policy, fraught with both complaints and compliments.
New legislation, recently introduced in the House, aims at delivering the next evolutionary step by reforming the nation’s largest low-income housing assistance program, commonly called Section 8. It is a program deemed especially vital in New Hampshire—a state mired in an affordable housing crisis.
Established in the 1970s, Section 8 provides vouchers to more than 2 million families annually, which they can use to assist with the rental of privately owned houses or apartments. Eligible families are required to pay about 30 percent of their monthly income for rent and utilities. The difference between what each family pays for rent and the actual cost is covered by the Section 8 voucher.
The program is praised for its ability to lift families out of homelessness, to provide economic security, to give families a choice in housing—allowing them to live near better jobs or schools—and the way it prevents low-income residents from being shunted to one area of a community.
But the program has had its share of problems, too. Housing agencies, advocacy groups, members of Congress and even the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development have grumbled about the inflexibility of its regulations, its convoluted formula for calculating funding and, not least of all, its need for more money.
More than 9,000 Section 8 vouchers are used in New Hampshire, and many thousands more families linger on waiting lists, according to Dean Christon, deputy director of the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority, the statewide agency that implements Section 8. But the program is just one solution to the affordable housing problem the state faces.
“Section 8 is very needed,” said Jane Law, communications director for the New Hampshire Workforce Housing Council. “It is a program that can have almost never enough money thrown at it. But we also need additional affordable subsidized housing units.”
“There’s a lot of answers,” she said. “It’s a complex problem.”
Granite State Housing Crisis
New Hampshire’s affordable housing problem is rooted deeply in a variety of issues—zoning restrictions, population changes, rising rents. And the problem does not just affect low-income families.
The price of real estate is “out of the range of most people,” said Susan Thielen, coordinator of Heading for Home, the Monadnock region’s workforce housing coalition. “I’m talking about any range of income.”
With the federal guidelines saying that a family should pay no more than 30 percent of its income for rent, finding affordable housing is impossible for many people. According to Thielen, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the region is $1,048, which means a person would have to earn more than $42,000 a year to afford the rent.
“Firemen, policemen, teachers—the real core of the community, the people we depend on—are just not earning that kind of money,” Thielen said.
The effects of a housing shortage add up in a multitude of ways.. Workers may be forced to commute long distances, neglecting community activities while harming roads and the environment. Others may leave the state if they are forced to turn down jobs in areas where rents are not affordable.
“New Hampshire needs another good 20,000-30,000 of almost any kind of housing, split between lower-income housing and housing for anyone,” said James Stitham, housing compliance officer with Southwestern Community Services, a Monadnock region organization that provides a variety of social services.
Without enough growth in the housing market, rents on the few available units rise far above what working families can afford, especially for those in entry-level positions, Stitham said. Thielen also attributed rising prices to increases in required minimum lot sizes and high land costs.
In this competitive market, Stitham and others agree, Section 8 is a vital asset for low-income families.
For a rental unit to qualify for Section 8 it must meet safety and hygiene standards and its rent must not be more than the government-set maximum allowed for a property with that number of bedrooms. Maximum rents vary from area to area based on the rental market in the area.
Vouchers are targeted to the neediest families—those whose incomes are 50 to 80 percent of an area’s median income. But because of intense demand and limited funds, eligibility does not guarantee that a family will receive a voucher. The New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority has more than 5,000 families on its waiting list, and most will wait three to four years before something opens up, Christon said.
In some parts of the country, where the wait stretches to 10 years, housing authorities have closed their waiting lists. In New Hampshire, Christon said, “we always keep ours open. But frankly, it’s a very long wait.”
In the meantime, families are forced to live in poor-quality housing, pay more than half their income for rent, apply for local welfare or even become homeless.
The Section 8 lament
The waiting lists are one manifestation of a widely repeated problem with Section 8—the shortage of funds, which prevent all eligible families from receiving vouchers.
According to Donna White, a Department of Housing and Urban Development spokeswoman, Section 8 has a $15.9 billion budget for fiscal 2007, consuming nearly half of HUD’s total $33.5 billion budget. The department’s budget request for 2008 is $36 billion, including $16 billion for Section 8, which White said would allow more vouchers to be used by more people.
The other oft-cited criticism of the Section 8 program is that it is inflexible and confusing, which even the department admits. “It has become very bureaucratic, very complex,” White said.
An abundance of regulations and formulas sprout from Section 8, but this is to be expected from such an enormous program, said Barbara Sard, director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research and policy institute.
What has been a convoluted mess, Sard said, is the way Section 8 has been funded because of “arbitrary, ill-considered changes that HUD and Congress made in the program since 2004.”
In 2004, HUD announced that it was allocating Section 8 funds to housing agencies based on the amount they spent during May, June and July of the previous year. Since then, a year’s worth of funding has been based off a single snapshot, causing some agencies to receive “more funding than they need, more funding then they could use,” while others lack adequate funds, Sard said.
To fix this funding method and streamline the program, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., introduced in late March the Section 8 Voucher Reform Act, currently awaiting debate in the House Financial Services Committee.
“[The bill] is a very good first step,” said Christon of the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority. “It makes [Section 8] a little more rational, more efficient.”
The bill would base Section 8 funding on a year’s worth of spending, as well as improve portability of Section 8 vouchers and give more flexibility to local housing authorities in allocating their vouchers and conducting safety inspections of housing units.
Both Waters and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said the legislation would clean up Section 8 and has a strong chance of passing.
The Housing Balance
According to Sard, an efficient housing program needs construction and preservation components, plus rent and operating subsidies—a balance unseen in current federal policy.
“Right now, we have an uncoordinated, sort of crazy-quilt pattern,” she said.
The low-income housing tax credit, which directly subsidizes housing development costs, is currently the only housing construction program the federal government pays for. But because money is allocated to states based on population, Sard said, in places like New Hampshire, “where there’s a pretty small population but a real cost crunch,” the program is under-funded and therefore ineffective.
Another proposal being talked about in Congress is the creation of a national housing trust fund, which would provide money for construction of new housing and rehabilitation of existing housing.
Frank introduced legislation on March 9, currently in committee, that would use funds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, congressionally chartered mortgage finance companies, to add close to $1 billion to the proposed trust fund.
“We also need some programs that construct affordable housing,” Frank said, since using Section 8 alone merely drives up prices by increasing demand for housing without adding to supply.
HUD spokeswoman White said that the department is not heading in the direction of funding housing construction programs and that the additional costs of these programs makes them unlikely.
So local housing authorities are left to find a desired balance on their own, while continuing to implement the contentious Section 8.
“We do wish HUD would renew its efforts to create new units of housing,” said Southwestern Community Services’ Stitham. “With, of course, Section 8 on the side.”
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