Mr. BOEHLERT. Thank you very much. And that is a very good illustration. There are so many deals with great potential that don't happen because of the concern about future liability.

Thank you very much, Mayor Morial. Mr. Borski?

Mr. BORSKI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I represent the City of Philadelphia and our Mayor, Ed Rendell, is I think one of the best Mayors in the country, if you don't mind. And we still have in the City of Philadelphia, despite having a great Mayor, probably the best in history, and, again, a great guy, we still have a major problem in the City of Philadelphia. We are still losing population even though we have someone who arguably has been called the greatest Mayor we have ever had, and part of it I think is because people are chasing the jobs. The new developments are in greenfields. They are in the open space. They are not taking place in brownfields in the cities, and so I don't think there is any argument that we need brownfields legislation.

My question to you would be, and you sat through the earlier discussions with the Administrator, if we are unable to come to an agreement on a comprehensive Superfund report, shouldn't we pass a narrowly defined brownfields piece of legislation that would give you the relief that you want to have? I can't imagine you would object to that.

Mayor TURNER. Well, it depends on how narrow that you go. If you go to the narrow definition that the Administrator talked about, which is the definition of innocent being reason or a way to know of likely contamination, you haven't changed anything from the current situation. You will have limited success. You will have huge Government intervention and investment in order to have any success. If you actually create an innocent purchaser defense where innocent means "I didn't contaminate it," then you are going to have a explosion of capital attracted to cities because these sites are attractive.

Let me give you an example. If we take a 10 acre site in our city, and we do an environmental assessment. And we have determined that there is a certain quantity of contamination and let's say it is going to take a half million dollars in our opinion to clean it up. There still isn't any certainty for that purchaser that that is it. Even if we say we will put up that half a million, and we do that environmental remediation, and they buy it and they build their new industrial facility, a week later, two weeks later, it could be determined that in fact this is, as was referred to before, this could be Love Canal and suddenly they now have the liability for the entire facility that they didn't contaminate and that they took the risk of going on. Unless that can be quantified, unless it can be determined what their actual liability is going to be, they will continue to go elsewhere and that stands for the factories that we have that are operating today.

Mayor MARSHALL. Mr. Borski, if I could?

Mr. BORSKI. Sure, Mayor?

Mayor MARSHALL. Take a piece of property that is anywhere in the United States in a city and it is sitting there vacant, there is a good chance that the owner of that property is aware in the sense of know history of the property that the property has contamination problems, but the owner is not going to do a phase 1 or a

phase 2 environmental inspection, find out what the contamination is and let EPD, EPA, whoever it is, know, as the owner is required to do under the law once they know. So they prefer in many instances to simply walk away from the property, fence it and leave it. And so we have a lot of properties that are stuck in that kind of a status quo. How do you get them out of that status quo? Well, one way to do that is to try to make the properties so attractive economically that people are pushing the owner to sell. In many instances, owners still are not going to sell. They are not going to be interested in finding out what the problem is because they know they are going to be liable for cleaning it up. The innocent purchaser defense that is in the Boehlert bill that we support, we think is a good idea, isn't going to solve that problem.

That the purchaser has protection still leaves the problem with the owner being unwilling to sell because the owner doesn't want to find out about the problem and then subsequently be held liable for the problem and that is a major issue in many of these instances and it would be nice if whatever bill comes out, that bill could somehow try to address that issue.

My impression is this, and I'm not a great expert in this area, but my impression is this: It is hoped by EPA and others that the economics associated with a particular parcel of land will be such that the person coming in and the person currently owning it will somehow reach a deal and clean it up. That this is the opportunity, it is when the transaction occurs. It is let's hold hostage the transaction to ensure that the land gets cleaned up. And if the purchaser isn't going to be forced to clean it up because they are going to be deemed innocent, then nobody may clean this land up and then the taxpayer might be stuck. Well, we certainly don't want to stick the taxpayers, but I am afraid that the status quo means that these lands are going to continue to lay fallow and in cities like Macon, they are not going to get more economically valuable. It is just not going to happen.

Mr. BORSKI. Yes, I guess my question was in a different sense, however. My question is and, again, you heard what the Administrator was saying, if we can't come to an accord and pass a comprehensive Superfund bill, should we pass a stand-alone brownfields bill that will give you the relief you need? My sense is that brownfields are being held hostage to the overall comprehensive reform. If we can't get that done, even though our all great intentions, would you be supportive of a stand-alone brownfields bill? Mayor MARSHALL. I think the position paper that the U.S. Conference of Mayors has submitted details the things that we think are very positive in the Boehlert bill. Whether it is the Boehlert bill or the Borski bill or some other bill, whether it is called comprehensive reform or brownfields bill, I don't know that that matters to the Conference. I think from a practical perspective, a bipartisan approach to this is absolutely necessary and the only bipartisan approach we have seen in the last couple of years is represented by the Boehlert bill.

So we would ask the Administration to work with the Boehlert bill to see whether or not that bill can't be fine-tuned in a way that would be satisfactory to the Administration. Obviously, we are in the position of having to say if we can't get everything we would

like, we will take what we can get because the current status quo is simply unacceptable. It really places one heck of a burden on cities.

Mr. BOEHLERT. Thank you very much, Mayor Marshall.

Mr. BORSKI. Mr. Turner? May I, Mr. Chairman?
Mr. BOEHLERT. Do you want to respond to that?

Mayor TURNER. Certainly. I think that it really depends on what you mean by brownfields though. In the discussion that was occurring this morning, the identification of what is an innocent purchaser defense seemed to be part of the chasm that exists in what bill should go forward. Brownfields reform, for it to be effective, is going to have to have an innocent purchaser defense where if you didn't pollute it, you are not liable for it. And the definitions that we were hearing this morning did not follow that.

Mr. BORSKI. But if we had that, if we had prospective purchaser, you would be for a stand-alone bill if we couldn't get comprehensive through that took care of that

Mr. BOEHLERT. Well, obviously they would want to see the bill. But the fact of the matter is if I

Mr. BORSKI. I have a bill I would recommend to you, H.R. 1750. We will send you a copy.

Mr. BOEHLERT. They will be glad to look at it. I would hope that you would share it with the U.S. Conference of Mayors as we have for all these years.

Mr. BORSKI. Good. By all means.

Mr. BOEHLERT. Let me point out that it is well beyond-it is not a choice of comprehensive reform or more targeted specific reform, we passed that debate long ago. We are not going forward with comprehensive Superfund reform. We are going forward with H.R. 1300, which has earned the support of Mayors from across the country and a whole wide range of organizations with narrowly, specifically targeted reforms. Čomprehensive is off the table. Í would prefer more comprehensive reform, but we are narrow, we are specific, we are addressing legitimate concerns, and we have done so in a bipartisan manner, which has earned the support of the organization you represent.

But I can tell Mr. Borski from my experience working with the Conference of Mayors, you are always receptive to any proposal that is advanced that addresses your legitimately identified problem. So thank you very much.

Mr. BORSKI. Mr. Chairman, my question to the Mayors was not if-obviously they support this bill of yours and they are free to do that and should be, my question is if that is not doable. They were here, they heard the Administrator today. There are more than small problems with the bill. The question really is can we do, if we can't do 1300, can we do a brownfields specific stand-alone bill and would that be helpful or not?

Mr. BORSKI. We could wait another couple Congresses before you get something else through.

Mayor TURNER. Right. I think Mayor Marshall was saying that our goal is that there be a bill that is successful and that passes and the bill that we came to testify for has bipartisan support. The possibility in the future of a limited brownfields bill is something that it sounds like the Administration from Administrator Browner

that they oppose also. And that really is the issue that we are here to support that is in Boehlert's bill.

Mr. BOEHLERT. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Mr. BORSKI. The Administrator has suggested she would sign 1750 into law, which would give the brownfields relief.

Mr. BOEHLERT. She would sign it to law?

[Laughter.]

Last time I checked, there was somebody at 1600 Pennsylvania that signs it.

Mr. Sherwood, it is a pleasure to recognize you?

Mr. SHERWOOD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And the testimony of the Mayors here today has been most interesting to me, and I thank you for coming because I think you have synthesized for us or brought together a big problem we are all grappling with and it is the relationship of development of greenfields or brownfields. And what you are telling us is if we can't get an innocent purchaser defense, the pressure will be to continue to develop greenfields. So we lose our farmland. We lose our timberland. We lose our view. And all the things that we don't want to lose.

And we can't bring the industrial development and the real estate prosperity back into our central cities where the infrastructure is already there. We don't have to rebuild it. We don't have to build it to start with. It is there. So I just want to bring that out. It seems so obvious to me. But do you feel that if we can do that and sort of get a clean bill of health after some remediation is being done for a purchaser that then you will have this activity back in your cities?

Mayor TURNER. Absolutely. We are approached daily and weekly from developers who have interests in properties in our city that have the financial wherewithal, the capital, and the businesses that will produce jobs only to have the deals and transactions fall through the cracks as a result of an inability to provide them the assurances that if they acquire land that is currently abandoned and develop it, that they would not be subject to liability for contamination that they did not create.

Mayor MARSHALL. Mr. Sherwood, I think it is a puzzle and this is one piece of the puzzle. There are a lot of factors in our society that push greenfield development over brownfields redevelopment and if you don't take each little step that you can in order to reverse that trend, simply because there exists all kinds of other steps that must be taken, it means you will take no steps and nothing will get done.

This is an opportunity to take a step in the right direction. Is it going to solve the entire problem for a city like Macon? Of course not. It is not going to do that. But it heads us in the right direction and it is a giant step, it is not a baby step.

Mr. SHERWOOD. But your testimony mirrors almost exactly the input that I get from Austin Burke, the head of the Stranton Chamber of Commerce, that if he tries to sell a brownfields as a opposed to a greenfield, it is no contest.

Mayor MARSHALL. That's true.

Mr. SHERWOOD. And, therefore, we have to remove the restrictions on the brownfields so that we can re-use that industrial property.

Mayor MARSHALL. Absolutely.

Mr. SHERWOOD. Thank you very much.

Mr. BOEHLERT. Thank you very much, Mayor Marshall, Mayor Turner. I want to thank you both very much. And we will do the best we can to try to help you and to try to help the President accept the challenge of redeveloping our cities and creating more job opportunities where they are needed most in your cities in Dayton and Macon and New Orleans. So we are partners for progress in this effort. Thank you once again.

Mayor TURNER. Thank you for having us.

Mayor MARSHALL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BOEHLERT. Our next panel consists of Mr. Stanley Diver, Vice President, Diver Chevrolet of Wilmington, Delaware. He is the spokesperson for the National Automobile Dealers Association, which has endorsed H.R. 1300. Mr. Thomas Sullivan, regulatory policy counsel from the National Federation of Independent Business, with whom we have worked closely, and they strongly endorse this bill, H.R. 1300. Mr. Michael Steinberg, Morgan Lewis & Bockius, Superfund Settlements Project; and Mr. Bernard J. Reilly, Corporate Counsel for DuPont De Nemours, a Chemical Manufacturers Association representative; and finally Velma Smith, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth. And she is making her way to the table.

We will go in the order of introduction. First, Mr. Diver from the National Automobile Dealers Association. Mr. Diver?

And in each instance, we would ask that you try to hold your testimony to no more than five minutes. Your full statement will appear in its entirety in the record at this point, but as you can see, we are trying to get on with the proceedings.

And the other thing is—and I always do this and I see some veterans here at the table-you've been before these subcommittees and full committees before, I always have to apologize because it would appear that you have two Members, three Members of Congress here, and what is all the interest in this bill for? The fact of the matter is there are other hearings going on at this very minute. The House is considering very important legislation dealing with the Y2K problem. Members aren't sitting around someplace twiddling their thumbs. They are off and doing other things. But we are vitally interested in your testimony and that will be shared with all of our colleagues. And, quite honestly, if the truth be known, we have the most important ingredients in this overall formula right here, the professional staff on both sides of the aisle.