Congressman Tom McClintock today announced that five communities in the 4th Congressional District succeeded in qualifying for Drug Free Communities (DFC) grants.  The DFC supports over 700 community coalitions across the United States and provides funding to identify and respond to local substance abuse problems.

"The applicants in our district won these grants the old fashioned way: they earned them on their merits,” said Congressman McClintock. 

"I believe that their success underscores the fact that meritorious programs do not need Congressional earmarks – meritorious programs do quite well in an open and competitive environment.  The fact that 4th District programs are so strongly represented in this program speaks volumes about the importance of merit-based evaluations as opposed to muscle-based earmarks,” McClintock said.  I am delighted that so many from our district have succeeded.”

 
New Grant Award

The Vision Coalition of El Dorado Hills was awarded $125,000 to reduce substance abuse in El Dorado County.  The group will implement marketing programs, direct community outreach and mentoring programs to reach at-risk young people.

Continuing Grant Awards

Placer County Health and Human Services Department: $125,000
Black Oak Mine Unified School District, Georgetown: $125,000
Butte County Mental Health Services: $100,000
Community Recovery Resources, Inc., Grass Valley: $100,000

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Congressman Tom McClintock made the following statement to the Regional U.S. Forest Service Management Roundtable hosted by Congressman Wally Herger in Sacramento on Wednesday, August 25th:

          I want to thank my friend and colleague, Congressman Herger, for organizing this meeting and for his invitation to participate in it.

          There are four general subjects that my constituents have brought to my attention that I feel are important to raise in this forum.

          First, some of the most disturbing stories I have heard locally involve the abuse of cost recovery fees by the Forest Service.  This has been a source of great frustration and evinces an attitude within the Service that I believe requires immediate correction.
 
          For example, the California Endurance Riders Association had been using the El Dorado National Forest for many years. This time, when they sought a simple 5-year 10-event permit to continue doing exactly what they have been doing without incident for decades, the Forest Service demanded $11,000 in fees. 

         They paid these fees, but the El Dorado National Forest management nevertheless pulled the approved permit and halted the process on utterly specious grounds.  It then demanded an additional $17,000 fee, causing the Endurance Riders Association to cancel what had been a long-term civic tradition that had been a boon to the local economy.  In 2010 this outrage was repeated after the group spent $5,800 for the “Fool’s Gold Endurance Run” that had been an ongoing event for more than 40 years.

        The Polka Dots Motorcycle Club tells a similar story of excessive Forest Service fees that forced them to cancel a ride they have sponsored for four decades. Likewise, the Gold Country Endurance Riders, an equestrian group, had to cancel an event they had been holding since 1993 because of a prohibitive increase in the permit fees.
          
          I seriously question the authority of the Forest Service to exact these fees at all, since federal guidelines do not require them if the surveys or research are done in the “public good.”  Moreover, it is clear the Forest Service was not dealing in good faith with these groups and that it should refund these fees in full and restore to them the full access to our public lands that they have been accorded for many years. 

          Second, the Forest Service is charging exorbitant Cabin User Fees to families that have had long-term possession of mountain cabins, based on peak market prices from 2007 and 2008.  These inflated prices are many times the actual market price in this distressed economy, forcing many of these families to abandon cabins that they have had for decades and even generations.

          Third, my office has been approached by several families that have had long-established grazing permits dating as far back as 1931, who are now seeing conditions placed on their use that are simply ludicrous.

           For example, the Leavell Family has grazed cattle in the Tahoe National Forrest since 1931 and by all accounts has been an excellent and responsible steward of the land.  The incidents of harassment that they have encountered from the Forest Service have been unconscionable. 

           With absolutely no warning, the Forest Service presented them with a letter declaring that they were in non-compliance because of cattle that occasionally stray off the land. Yet in the past, federal regulations have prohibited them from building fences to prevent that very problem.  The Forest Service recently charged that the cattle were damaging Aspen stands – allegations that further inspection proved to be groundless.  Having failed to make its case on these grounds, the Forest Service then ordered the Leavells to remove cabins they have maintained and paid property taxes on for 79 years. 

           Also without warning, the Forest Service told the Coughlin family that it was cancelling their long-standing grazing permit because of a lack of sufficient feed as determined by a Forest Service biologist.  A subsequent field trip utterly disproved the biologist’s opinion – so the Forest Service next informed them that their permit is still in jeopardy because of the same wandering cows that it used as pretense in the Leavell’s case.

          Finally – and most importantly, since this affects the safety of entire communities in my district – I remain concerned over the demonstrated disinterest that the Forest Service has recently demonstrated in supporting sustainable timber harvests.   The expensive and labor-intensive process of twig removal cannot achieve fuel reductions that reduce the risk and intensity of forest fires.  We must restore responsible and sustainable thinning of over populated forests called for in the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Restoration Act of 1998, and which the U.S. Forest Service is now thwarting in our region.

          For generations, the U.S. Forest Service maintained a balanced approach to the management of our forests that assured both healthy forests and a healthy economy.  Now, it seems to be following a very different policy of exclusion, expulsion and benign neglect of our forests. 

           My office has brought these concerns and complaints of arbitrary and capricious conduct to the Forest Service’s attention without a satisfactory resolution.

           Practiced in the marketplace, we would renounce these tactics as predatory and abusive.  In the public service sector, they are intolerable. 

            Combined, these actions evince an ideologically driven hostility to the public’s use of the public’s land – and a clear intention to deny the public the responsible and sustainable use of that land.

              If the Forest Service fails to reverse these policies – and the attitude that has produced them – I intend to use my position on the National Parks, Forests and Public Lands subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee to press for extensive hearings during the next session of Congress into the economic damage these actions have caused.

# # #
 

Mr. Speaker:

Many people are asking why Congress is here today.  I think the answer’s pretty simple: we’re not bankrupting the country fast enough and so we need to come back and spend more.

In the merciful week that Congress was not in session, my constituents had one message: STOP THE SPENDING.  Obviously, Congress isn’t listening.

Over the past two years, this administration and this Congress have increased spending by nearly 18 percent and run up more debt in two years than the irresponsible Bush administration did in all of its eight years combined.  Meanwhile, unemployment has increased from 7.6 to 9.5 percent.  Yet the problem in the view of House Democrats is that we just haven’t spent enough.   So we gather here today to shovel another $26 billion at the problem

That comes to about $330 for an average family – taken directly out of the nation’s struggling economy.  We’re told, don’t worry, it’s paid for.

How’s that?  $10 billion is from increasing taxes on businesses with foreign subsidiaries.  But remember this: BUSINESSES DON’T PAY BUSINESS TAXES.   Business taxes can only be paid in one of three ways – by us as consumers through higher prices, by us as employees through lower wages, and by us as investors through lower earnings on our 401(k) plans.

Another $12 billion comes from cuts to Food Stamps starting in 2014, but we’re going to use the savings starting now.  I tried that one out with my wife at home.  “Honey, sure we can afford that new Jet Ski this year – I’m planning on cutting our grocery budget by $10,000 in 2014.”  I’m sad to report that she didn’t buy that.

We’re told this is part of the plan to “save or create” jobs.  M. Speaker, this isn’t saving jobs – it is destroying them.  Government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy until it has first taken that dollar out of the very same economy. 

We see the job “saved or created” when the government puts the money back into the economy.  What we don’t see as clearly are the jobs lost or prevented when the government first has to take that money out of the economy.  We see the lost or prevented jobs through chronic unemployment rates and a stagnant jobs market at a time when we should long ago have moved into a normal “V” shaped economic recovery.

Nor does this even guarantee saving teaching jobs.  Good school boards, faced with the choice between a couple of good teachers or a pointless and over-paid bureaucrat are probably going to keep the teachers and fire the bureaucrat.  But this bill says they don’t have to make that choice.  Indeed, this bill says they’re actually prohibited from doing anything that would reduce their spending below last year’s level. 

What about Medicaid?  A bi-partisan group of legislators in my state of California tells us they need this bailout money to save the state’s Medicaid program.  But bailing out bad management doesn’t improve it.  At the peak of the good times, when California was taking in more money than ever before, it was already running a deficit of over $9 billion – almost ten percent of its budget.

 Just four years ago, those same legislators voted Medicaid expansions that have increased its share of general fund spending from 14 to 19 percent.  California offers such Medicaid options as acupuncture, chiropractic services and psychological counseling. 

 And now they’re shocked-just-shocked that they keep running out of money. 

I love my state, but deficits that are made in California should stay in California.

 M. Speaker, with the nation now some 13.2 trillion in debt – 93 percent of the entire economy – it is time to invoke the first law of holes: when you’re in one – stop digging.  And if Congress doesn’t invoke that law now, I can all but guarantee you the American people will invoke it in November.
 

House Chamber, Washington, D.C.
August 10, 2010.  Full Text.
 

Representative McClintock on the Neil Cavuto Program, August 9, 2010.

McClintock on Neil Cavuto Show - August 9, 2010.

Statement by Representative Tom McClintock on the Proposition 8 Ruling:  Judge Walker’s opinion that traditional marriage is an affront to the Bill of Rights would no doubt have come as a surprise to the American Founders – and to more than two centuries of American jurisprudence affirming that institution.  Fortunately, the architects of our Constitution recognized the damage that feeble reasoning can do from the bench and provided a multitude of checks and balances – starting with the appellate process – which I am confident will now be brought into play.