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the emergency arises and these volunteers jump on their trucks or get in their car and put on the blue light and head for the fire, when they arrive there, they may be 7 or 10 miles from that equipment and cannot get it there in an emergency. It has to be on the spot and readily available or it is no good to you.

Mr. McCORMACK. If you have the fire fighters established with the Boy Scouts you have a real preferential status over even what the schools, colleges, and hospitals have under the law.

In other words, all you have got to do is go to the Secretary of Defense and persuade him that it comes within the accepted category of the existing law just like the Boy Scouts were and then you have a real preference.

Mr. NIMTZ. If Mr. Fogarty would join me with his eloquence I would be glad to go over to the Secretary of Defense and join in that. But we want to make sure that volunteer fire-fighting organizations come within the act. I know it is a difficult decision to make in light of the Department's unfavorable recommendation, but the committee with their broad shoulders, I know could make the decision and stand by it and help these dedicated people who compose these volunteer fire-fighting organizations.

Thank you, sir.

Mr. McCORMACK. It seems to me the fire fighters ought to be entitled to a favorable decision more than the Boy Scouts and some of the other organizations, not that I have not got a very high regard for them for I have.

But that decision has disturbed the members of this select subcommittee and disturbed me as the author of the Donable Property Act. You see the Donable Property Act came about because the Defense Department, through an erroneous interpretation of the law, in my opinion, had declared that property was no longer needed in stockfund operations, was not surplus, and could not be donated.

Now, if they declared it surplus, then it had to go down to the General Services and then to the Health, Education, and Welfare; did it not?

But by declaring it excess for stock-fund purposes only, it did not become surplus and they sold it and they were getting on an average of about 6 cents on the acquisition dollar selling this property which was in fact surplus, and putting the receipts back into the stock fund. Since 95 percent of your surplus property comes from the Defense Department, the result was that the existing law was defeated through the clever operation of the Defense Department in surplus property excess rather than surplus, and we had to meet that situation.

Now, in the old law, when it was wide open, an awful lot of abuses arose, and one of the problems facing this committee is that we are in no way deciding against the fine intentions of every organization seeking legislation, that if you open it wide then these abuses come back on the part of a few. It is always happening in life and then it defeats the whole program because when you pick up this abuse where some organization got it or some group got it and then sold it, as happened some years ago, not used it for themselves, but under the guise of being a beneficiary under the law, they got certain surplus property, then they sold it, is that right, Mr. Lund, they sold it? Mr. LUND. That is right.

Mr. McCORMACK. It only takes a few abuses like that to create a wave of public opinion and then the whole law is defeated. Ninetyeight percent of the groups who were beneficiaries and who conform with the law have to suffer for 1 or 2 percent who abuse it and we have had that history, and that is what you have got to be very careful not to extend it too far, impugning nobody's motives but knowing human nature on the part of a small group, and the effect upon the whole law itself, and that is one of the reasons why, main reasons why you have to be, the committee has to be awfully careful because we know it is only a matter of time when the effectiveness of the whole law will be impaired, if not defeated, and one has to be cautious and it is in no way impugning anybody's motives but we know what happened before. Those remarks are not addressed against any particular bill pending before the committee but is a broad statement.

Let me ask you, Mr. Lund, is the Education, Health, and Civil Defense now getting the maximum available surplus property?

Mr. LUND. No, I think they are not for several reasons.

One is this is a cooperative arrangement between the States and the Federal Government, and we have problems, of course, in transportation, screening, and costs. Because of the fact that you have to screen the property, you have to evaluate it and it would not be advantageous to take all of it and place it out, some of it is not applicable.

For example, in certain types of tools, the school cannot use it advantageously, it is either not properly powered, overpowered, or maybe in such condition that the transportation cost is too high.

We have continued to encourage the States, and we have ourselves attempted to expand our screening, and we think that it is generally becoming better and better, but I would say, in answer, that I think we are getting the majority that is suitable for this purpose, but a hundred percent, no.

We can still improve in that area.

Mr. MAY. Apparently some of the volunteer fire-fighting units did not realize they could get their property through civilian defense. Mr. LUND. We would be perfectly willing to give any volunteer fire department that writes for information and assistance on how to proceed in any way possible.

This of course comes under the civil-defense setup, the arrangements between our department and the Civil Defense Administrator generally provide that the rules and regulations are under the jurisdiction of Civil Defense and they do require State approved plans.

But we have not run into any serious difficulty. Currently as far as we can make the observation, we have more requests for this kind of item than the screeners are able to locate.

But we will continue to make inquiry into this area to see what the potential is.

Mr. McCORMACK. Mr. Nimtz?

Mr. NIмTZ. Mr. Chairman, if I may make one other statement. These gentlemen can speak for themselves as typical fire-fighting companies but from my experience in Indiana I have found a reluctance on the part of volunteer fire departments to come within the jurisdiction or framework of the civil defense organization.

These volunteer firemen are willing to cooperate and render service at any time, but when you get into the question of jurisdiction and you are working with a township trustee or a board of county super

visors or county commissioners, you find a realm of chain of command and of supervision that they may not want to complicate by coming within the structure and hierarchy of the civil defense organizations. I have found a reluctance by these volunteer firemen to come within that particular orbit or realm of command there. They want to stay within their own particular jurisdiction.

Mr. MAY. Mr. Chairman, on that, I think I would have to make a statement, too.

From analyzing this bill and talking to many volunteer fire-fighting units in Connecticut, I would say the same thing. They are always ready to volunteer and work hard in the various disasters. In my town, which happens to be the oldest town in Connecticut, I think they have the oldest volunteer fire department in existence in the United States, in continuous existence, and I know that they are ready, willing, and able to help the State in emergencies but they have their own interests, and they run their own drives and in their own ways as do all the other towns in the State and are very well organized but they do not like to be under the jurisdiction of any other organization, but are always ready to tie right in when the occasion comes up and that may be, plus lack of knowledge of this other thing, the reason why many of them have not participated in the program. Mr. McCORMACK. Well, we will call you again, Mr. Lund.

We have these other gentlemen who have come here.

Mr. Williams J. Thomas III.

Is Mr. Thomas here?

Mr. THOMAS. Yes, sir.

Mr. McCORMACK. Will you give us your address, Mr. Thomas? And whom you represent?

STATEMENT OF W. J. THOMAS III, PRESIDENT, SANDY SPRING VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT, INC., MONTGOMERY COUNTY,

MD.

Mr. THOMAS. Yes, sir. I am, as you know, W. J. Thomas III, the president of the Sandy Spring Volunteer Fire Department, Inc., and the chairman of the public relations committee of the Montgomery County Association of Volunteer Firemen.

I also served last year as the chairman of the Montgomery County Fire Board, which is a semiofficial unit of the Montgomery County government, and I was asked to come here in a hurry, so, as has been stated, I have no prepared statement.

Mr. McCORMACK. You go right ahead.

Mr. THOMAS. I would like very much to speak in favor-would you I was prejudiced if I used Representative Hyde's bill?

say

Mr. McCORMACK. Go ahead.

Mr. THOMAS. He is my Representative, you know.

Mr. MCCORMACK. Go right ahead.

Mr. THOMAS. We have in Montgomery County more than 1,200 volunteer firemen, and we serve an area of about 524 square miles and I think probably we have a large percentage of the House of Representatives who have homes in that area.

So some of them are familiar with what we do, and so are you.
However, we always are hard put to it to find equipment.

A new fire truck of the type that we deem proper to protect life and property costs in the neighborhood of from $25,000 to $30,000 and when you have a volunteer fire department, which is subject to the whims of its, shall I say, customers, to support it, $25,000 to $30,000; comes very hard.

So that any attempt to reissue surplus Government property which would help us and help reduce our expense of operation would be a tremendous boon to us.

Mr. Lund, in speaking for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, made the remark that he was interested in education almost primarily.

However, the type of equipment that we would use seems to me to be slightly removed from the province of education.

To pick up a quota of tarpaulins and things of that nature-surplus generators, for example, to give our firehouses emergency power service, as happened last winter when our department was out of electricity for some 2 or 3 days.

These things when made available to us would be taken care of. It would reduce the storage problem, and we also ought to say something about accepting gear from civil defense.

In Montgomery County, all of our departments are adequately trained and have training programs under the University of Maryland fire service, and we have been able to get a little and I would like to emphasize the word "little"-help through the civil defense.

But we found-we have found out already that the acceptance of this property has, well it should be a little dramatic to say delivered us into the hands of civil defense; we think we are the original civil defense, the volunteer fire services.

We go when the first bell rings.

So in order to have to wait for the civil defense department to get its redtape into organization has held us up more than once already. We are the first to cooperate with them, but we are also rather independent. Of course, the average American citizen is never dependent or anything like that. But I think volunteer firemen are more so than most, otherwise we would not go out in the dark hours or the stormy nights and risk our lives and lose them.

I do not want to get carried away with myself but asking me to talk about volunteer fire department is like turning on the spigot and throwing away the handle.

I have been one for over 20 years; the fire department of which I have the honor to be the president has been in existence for 34 years. We have what we consider first-class equipment but, as with everything, we are always short with the things we need.

We need more hose. We know such hose is available to us under the surplus-property program.

We need such things as electric generators. We need what might be called squad equipment, such as used in a hurricane type of disaster. We can use lots of stuff that is or could be available to us under this program. We do not think it would be in competition with other programs as put forth by Mr. Lund's department.

So I would like to speak for our over 1,200 firemen-one other thing before I go away from the thing altogether.

It might interest the committee to know that it costs the 16 volunteer and semipaid departments in Montgomery County approxi

mately $850,000 each year to operate, and this money has to come from our communities, and in some cases our taxpayers. Some of our companies are allowed a small tax support, something in the neighborhood of, let's say, 10 cents a hundred dollars assessed valuation for the record in some cases.

Others are still dependent upon voluntary contributions. And, if we have to spend nearly a million dollars, any other equipment that we can get would help us tremendously in holding down this expenditure of funds.

I realize that surplus property has already been bought and paid for by the taxpayers and I cannot see any better use for it than to be passed on to people such as the volunteer fire departments and rescue squads-I do not want to omit them because their service is important to life.

Mr. McCORMACK. Well, aren't they a part of these volunteer firemen?

Mr. THOMAS. In many cases, yes.

In Montgomery County it so happens we have two independent rescue squads operating alongside the volunteer fire services reasonably peaceably in most cases.

So I would like these things that I have said to indicate that we would like very much to see a bill such as this proposed by Representative Hyde and his-the other bills presented by his coworkers, become a part of the law of these United States.

Mr. McCORMACK. Any questions, Mr. May?

Mr. MAY. No questions.

Mr. MCCORMACK. Anybody else appearing here in favor of the fire fighters bill?

Mr. NIMITZ. We have three gentlemen here from one of the Virginia counties. I asked Mr. Broyhill to send some representatives. They may want to make a statement or observation in light of the proceedings here this morning.

Mr. McCORMACK. Any of you gentlemen want to say something? STATEMENT OF FERRIS FILLEY, PRESIDENT, DUN LORING VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT, FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA.

Mr. FILLEY. My name is F. B. Filley. I am president of the Dun Loring Fire Department and also president of the county association.

It might be said at that moment and I could say it that I represent 18, 19 volunteer fire companies, over 1,500 men.

This problem has not been taken up with them but I am sure they would agree with me, after trying to buy surplus material at Fort Belvoir and Fort Myer, Camp Meade, and other places like that in competition with other people, and not getting it frequently, and as the gentleman says, not having the money so frequently, because it comes in dribbles of 25 and 50 cents and a dollar and frequently nothing at all, and the engines costing what they do, it would certainly be a welcome thing if we were permitted to get this equipment through this program.

Thank you very much.

Mr. McCORMACK. Any other gentleman?

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