Save America's Communities Coalition

Dialogue between Reps. Jim Nussle (R-IA), Nancy Johnson (R-CT) and Michael Turner (R-OH)
Congressional Record, Page H1559, March 16, 2005

Mr. NUSSLE. Mr. Chairman, to talk about the importance of our communities and our cities, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson).

Mrs. JOHNSON of Connecticut. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman for yielding me this time

As a member of the Save Our Cities Caucus, which is chaired by the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Turner), I rise in strong support of full funding of the Community Development Block Grant and Community Services Block Grant.

Our cities are hardest hit by the tough social problems of this age: poverty, drug abuse, underachievement. And I am proud that Republicans have long understood that the Federal Government has a responsibility to support our cities. They are the life blood of our commerce, but locally controlled Federal dollars are far more powerful than arbitrary Federal programs.

It is extremely important that we fully fund these critical programs because they preserve the local power of local governments to fix holes in the safety net, to assure the services that people need. In New Britain, my hometown; in Meridien or Danbury, Connecticut; or in Waterbury, the largest city in my district, Community Development Block Grant funds and Community Service Block Grant funds leverage several times their value to provide child care, elder care, literacy programs, substance abuse treatment programs, after-school programs. They help those cities demolish buildings that are a blight or that harbor drug dealers. They help clean up brownfields. They improve fire stations. They improve parks. They rebuild sidewalks. They reconstruct streets. They work to make our cities able to attract the economic development that provides jobs and a healthy urban environment.

So between the Community Development Block Grant and the Community Services Block Grant, the Federal Government has traditionally contributed, and under Republican leadership, generously, to assure the safety net in the cities and the economic strength of our urban communities.

So I thank the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) for recognizing, as the majority of Republicans do, the importance of these flexible block grant programs to our urban communities.

Mr. NUSSLE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Turner), the chairman of that coalition, to talk about the same subject, the importance of our communities and the Community Development Block Grant.

Mr. TURNER. Mr. Chairman, as the chairman indicated, I chair a working group appointed by the gentleman from Illinois (Speaker Hastert) called Save America's Cities. This working group has 24 members of the Republican conference who have backgrounds in urban issues, either having served as mayors or members of city councils or otherwise in local government, or who by their districts have a natural affinity for urban issues by working closely with their communities and seeing the difficulty of urban revitalization and redevelopment and the commitment to bringing jobs back to our cities.

Mr. Chairman, I support the Committee on the Budget in adding $1.140 billion to the administration's request for programs under the community and regional development function in the budget, which includes the Community Development Block Grant. The budget document itself specifically lays out that the funds are being restored with the clear intention of supporting the Community Development Block Grant program, or CDBG.

It goes on to state that the resolution makes no assumption regarding implementation of the President's proposed Strengthening America's Communities Block Grant or transferring the Community Development Block Grant program from the Department of HUD to the Department of Commerce. This is an important notation because it is very important for national associations that support urban issues, like the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities, that have had a great deal of concern about the consolidation of 18 programs, some of which are currently located in HUD, to Commerce and the reduction in overall spending, which was proposed of 30 percent.

This House, in taking the action of supporting the Committee on the Budget's resolution, does not accept the President's level of funding and looks to restore functions for CDBG that go to important issues in our community such as taking abandoned houses and refurbishing them, demolishing abandoned buildings where they cannot be rehabilitated, taking abandoned lots that might have been strewn with broken grass or be places where criminals congregate and turning them into community parking lots that can help support areas of local community business districts.

Looking, as the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson) was saying, to the area of brownfields, we have abandoned factory sites throughout our urban core which make it more difficult for us to bring jobs to those areas of our cities, to find ways to environmentally clean up those sites, and to demolish the buildings, bringing jobs back into them. The Community Development Block Grant program supports those functions.

I also serve as chairman of the Federalism and the Census Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Reform, and we recently held a subcommittee hearing on the administration's proposal to consolidate existing direct grant economic and community development programs within the Department of Commerce. We heard information from the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities where they told of the success of these programs.

I want to thank the chairman for listening to the great degree of success that they have had in the past and looking to ways that we can continue to support this program.