come up with that figure then than the program really got going and the applications have poured in to such an extent that I think our $50 million is probably the minimum and that we ought to have asked for

more.

Regardless of that we are, of course, aware of the budgetary problem

here.

Senator CLARK. Let me ask you whether it is the joint judgment of the panel that $50 million could be wisely spent in fiscal 1967?

Mr. VOORHEES. There is absolutely no question in our minds at all that it could be.

Senator CLARK. Let us have some evidence to sustain that opinion. Mr. VOORHEES. As of June 30 they will have allocated $25 million to some 150 programs. To refund those programs during the coming year they have estimated that it will cost about $35 million.

In other words, the new service will be added on.

Senator CLARK. I imagine that during part of fiscal 1966 the program was not underway so that as you come to the later months the amounts increase?

Mr. VOORHEES. That is right. The caseload increase from month to month almost geometrically. Now this program has tremendous impetus. We have really been working on it, the profession has been working on it hard. In some areas where legal aid was not able to break through and persuade the local bar to set up local legal aid societies, at long last the interest has been awakened and the ŎEO is being flooded with applications many of which of course will not be funded by the end of this year.

There is so much discussion of this thing going on, there has been so much debate, and the arguments in favor of this program have been so persuasive that we anticipate that this flood of applications will continue.

Now, of course, if Congress turns off the money, then the applications obviously will fall off and obviously will not be funded. In the light of our back history of having struggled and struggled and struggled to get legal aid established in the major communities of this country, we just feel that if we lose that impetus, if Congress cuts the thing back and turns this program into one that will be a little more than a demonstration of legal aid in 150 communities rather than from coast to coast, that that would be a great tragedy so far as legal aid would be concerned.

There are now in addition to the 150 applications that have been funded or are about to be funded by the end of this month, a hundred additional applications that are in the works and would obviously take care of the difference between $35 and $50 million very rapidly. Senator CLARK. Are those additional applications listed in your statement or does your statement include only the ones that have actually been funded?

Mr. VOORHEES. We did not include as an exhibit the other applications that are in the works.

Senator CLARK. Could you obtain that list?

Mr. VOORHEES. We could obtain that and will be very glad to submit that to you.

Senator CLARK. Without objection it will appear in the record at the end of his testimony.

Mr. VOORHEES. Fine.

Senator CLARK. I have been looking over this list which is attached to your statement and have come out of it with a feeling that it is in a sense nationwide, but also terribly spotty.

To pinpoint what I have in mind let us take the State that you and I know best as a guinea pig. In Pennsylvania you have only three cities listed, Chester, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. The allocation to Chester, by far the smallest of the three, is almost four times as much as the allocation to Pittsburgh, the second largest city in the State. In addition, most of the middle-sized cities in the Commonwealth are not represented at all.

Can you explain this and then tell me what can be done, for example, to get something moving in York, Lancaster, Altoona, Johstown, Erie, Reading and so forth.

Mr. VOORHESS. May I first introduce Mr. Orison S. Marden, president-elect of the American Bar Association?

Senator CLARK. I am glad to see you, Mr. Marden.

Mr. MARDEN. I am sorry for being late.

Senator CLARK. I want to apologize for starting before you got here. Will you go ahead, Mr. Voorhees?

Mr. VOORHESS. In Philadelphia we got an enormous appropriation because we really worked on the thing and we had the bar association, the legal aid society and the defender all planning this out carefully and then a good application.

Pittsburgh has a legal aid society which approached the problem with a certain amount of timidity and finally did not accept the grant and the local bar association then stepped in and picked it up.

But they did it with a certain amount of reserve and therefore it is no where near as broad a program as in Philadelphia.

There is a bad situation in Chester.
Senator CLARK. I am aware of that.

You are aware of that.

Mr. VOORHEES. Now we have legal aid committees in, I would say, 8 or 10 of the smaller cities.

Senator CLARK. How do you explain the fact that Chester is there, for example and West Chester is not?

Mr. VOORHEES. Chester is there because the greater Chester movement is aggressive and on the ball, came up with applications, got the bar association more or less to back it, it is a little bit touchy, you know. And there are some public spirited industrialists that got behind it.

Senator CLARK. Is it a fair generalization that where the local power structure is behind the program it goes and where they are not it is apt not to get off the ground?

Mr. VOORHEES. No, I don't think that is a fair generalization. I think the local power structure generally speaking is out in the caboose somewhere.

Senator CLARK. Out where?

Mr. VOORHEES. In the caboose. I think that where you have a strong legal aid society and a strong progressive bar association then the program moves.

Senator CLARK. Is there any correlation between movement and whether or not the legal aid society is part of the communuity chest?

Mr. VOORHEES. No; I don't think particularly one way or the other. All I can say with regard to the balance of Pennsylvania is that I know that there is tremendous interest in Allentown, Harrisburg, York, I believe. We are going to have this on the program at Bedford Springs, the meeting next week. I would hope that there would be at least 10 or 12 more applications coming in from Pennsylvania during the course of the summer.

Senator CLARK. As a result of the way this program is growing doesn't it have very little relationship to the actual need? It takes a few people in a community who get steamed up about it and get enough support to file an application?

Mr. VOORHEES. I don't think that is fair either. I think in most places where applications have been made they have followed along studies of the need and they have been able to document it. But of course there are a great many communities where the need is perfectly tremendous and there is apathy in the community and no application has come along.

Senator CLARK. Isn't it true that unless you have strong community interest there is not much use in authorizing money for a community? Mr. VOORHEES. Well, I cannot agree with that either. Let me just talk in terms of our experience with legal aid.

Senator CLARK. Yesterday we had some extremely stimulating testimony from Mayor Lindsay of New York who strongly advocated a restoration of the money which the House committee cut from title II.

His strong plea was that this program goes to the grassroots and cannot be superimposed from Washington. Thus unless you have a strong community interest in each of the different areas, whether it is Headstart, legal services or Neighborhood Youth Corps, you are pretty much doomed to failure. He felt that title II, the community action program, is the area where local initiative is encouraged and where local flexibility is very important indeed.

His pitch was that this is the most important part of the program. Although we did not discuss legal services, I am pretty sure that he would have said legal services are a very important part of the whole community action program.

But if there is no local group that is pressing, you are better off to put the funds into Headstart or into the Neighborhood Youth Corps. You have to cut your pattern to fit not only the local need but also the local potential for leadership.

With that explanation, will you comment?

Mr. VOORHEES. I think I would differentiate the legal service program, sir, from some of the others on the basis that you do have leadership in the legal profession in every community that recognizes the compelling need to provide legal services for the poor.

Senator CLARK. That does not show up in your statement. It seems to me it does not show up in Pennsylvania except in Chester and Philadelphia and a little in Pittsburgh.

Mr. VOORHEES. I ought to quickly correct the Pittsburgh figures. Our figure of $27,000 should be corrected to show $222,000. The thing has been expanded.

Senator CLARK. That is somewhat different.

Mr. VOORHEES. It is true that you have conservative elements in the bar that will not come forward unless prodded and take the initiative in establishing legal aid in the old days or legal services program today. But nonetheless the bar moves slowly but it does move fairly surely.

I think that the bar under the leadership of, last year then President Powell, and President Cune this year, and particularly the presidentelect, Mr. Marden, the bar accepts this thing and realizes its potentialities and its potential amount not only for our profession carrying out its mandate to provide the services but also a real appreciation of what can be done here through legal services programs to help eradicate the conditions that you have in places like Watts and so on and that therefore you can count on the profession, regardless of what the community may be, to come forward.

Let me illustrate it. In Alabama, for instance, the State bar has come forward with a very strong resolution supporting this legal service program and directing all the local bar associations to get be hind it and file applications and get these services set up.

Senator CLARK. Yet, Mr. Voorhees, there is no community in Alabama on your list?

Mr. VOORHEES. Not as yet.

Senator CLARK. On the list you are going to give us, the 100 that are applying, will there be any from Alabama?

Mr. VOORHEES. I cannot say with any certainty that it will be on the list that we are going to give you within the next day or so. But if we were going to give you another list as of the 1st of September I would be confident that the principal cities of Alabama would come through. Mississippi, for example, the neighboring State, applications are coming in and we have one or two funded programs down there already.

Senator CLARK. You have two there, Clarksdale and Oxford. Would you now turn to what you would do with the money if you got it?

Mr. VOORHEES. I am going to ask Mr. Ortique, who is particularly interested in this, to answer you.

Mr. ORTIQUE. Senator, certainly we feel that $50 million is a minimum figure. We recognize the Congress is concerned with spending the taxpayer's money and spending it wisely. We would like to point out to the committee that this $50 million is an investment.

Senator CLARK. Let me interrupt for just a minute. I don't doubt that you gentlemen can justify in a vacuum $50 million for legal

services.

However, if we give you a $50 million authorization, then we have to decide where we are going to take it from.

In the course of your presentation for $50 million, I hope you will bear that in mind and perhaps some of you will be so bold as to indicate what you would do if you were sitting on this side of the bench. Will you proceed?

Mr. ORTIQUE. First of all, when we talk about $50 million for this, far too frequently people get the notion that we are talking about paying lawyers, we are talking about $50 million for paying staff. Few people want to consider the $50 million as an investment in the American people.

I think this is most important because when we consider spending the American dollar we ought to be concerned about what is coming back to us.

Senator CLARK. You can make the basic assumption that we agree with you on that. Now what are you going to spend the money forlegal fees?

Mr. ORTIQUE. We are going to spend the money making people raise themselves out of this poverty situation by having them spend the money in other areas that will be more productive not only for them but also for the economy in general.

Senator CLARK. How much of the $50 million will go to legal fees? Mr. ORTIQUE. We are saying in the organized bar that lawyers should be properly compensated. But in every program we have insisted that lawyers accept something less than the minimum fee schedule for that particular area.

I think that is good. We think that lawyers have been sold on the notion. I think most of the lawyers would charge 75 percent of the minimum fee schedule.

Senator CLARK. How much of the $50 million will go for legal fees? Mr. ORTIQUE. I don't know exactly how much would go for legal fees but I would suspect it would be something perhaps a little in excess of 50 percent of this amount.

Senator CLARK. Let me ask Mr. Voorhees if he can tell us how much of the money spent in Philadelphia will go for legal fees?

Mr. VOORHEES. This all goes to salaries, you understand. None of it goes directly to a particular lawyer for a specific legal job.

Senator CLARK. I understand you follow it through the association? Mr. VOORHEES. We have set up a new legal service office which will have about 35 lawyers in it. They will be paid a little better than $10,000 apiece. That would be $350,000 which would be a little less than the $700,000 which covers rent, secretaries and all the other things that go with it.

Senator CLARK. They will be on salary and not on fee?

Mr. VOORHEES. On salary.

Senator CLARK. Is this generally true across the board?

Mr. VOOHEES. That is true everyplace except in one or two States where they have set up this judicare, with which you are probably familiar, where the individual practitioners will be paid for the services they render.

Senator CLARK. Now, in connection with service to the poor, is a fee charged?

Mr. VOORHEES. No.

Senator CLARK. Then I do not understand what Mr. Ortique meant when he said they would charge 75 percent of the minimum fee bill. Mr. ORTIQUE. This is in those cases where we have the judicare situation. There are very few places; northern Wisconsin, for example, is

one area.

Senator CLARK. Is this a relatively minor part of it?

Mr. ORTIQUE. A minor part of the program. Every lawyer in the major part of the program will be on a fixed salary in keeping with the experience of the usual criteria for establishing salaries.