Senate Journal: Page 34: Tuesday, January 11, 2000

  activities that range from being a fitness instructor, to her sorority to
  her church.
  Quality of health care opportunities was Iowa's promise to Yukio.
  Welcome home to Iowa, Yukio.
  However, being a national leader in education or preventative health care
  will
  mean little if we can not drink the water or breathe the air.  Aldo Leopold
  once said
  that:  "We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to
  us.  When
  we see the land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it
  with love
  and respect."  We face a severe threat to water quality from the 159
  polluted
  waterways that crisscross our state.  We clean up these waterways by
  recognizing what
  the land and water are to all of us-the essential building blocks of our
  future-the
  essential infrastructure of our state.  We must invest in our working land
  and water.
  Our clean water initiative proposes to do just that.  For a small investment
  of state
  dollars, we generate over $50 million from the federal government to put in
  the pockets
  of our farm families in the form of incentives for farmer participation in
  private land
  conservation programs.  These programs support the establishment of
  vegetative
  buffers, field borders and wetlands; as well as encourage soil conservation
  practices.

  The clean water initiative we propose is a catalyst for positive change and
  builds on
  what we know works.  Fully fund the clean water initiative and watch the
  native
  prairie grasses grow and become home to natural habitat that will draw
  people from
  all over the country.  Fully fund the clean water initiative and measure the
  improvement of our water.  Fully fund the clean water initiative and welcome
  more
  prosperity back to rural Iowa.  This clean water initiative will establish
  Iowa as a
  national leader in private land conservation.

  One other program also must be fully funded to improve Iowa's environment.
  Isn't
  it about time to fulfill the promise made to the people of Iowa in the last
  century, in the
  last millennium, shouldn't we finally fund REAP at $20 million?

  Leadership involves accepting the challenge of finding solutions to what
  appears to
  be unsolvable problems.  Leadership in land stewardship and the environment
  mandates that we resolve the hog lot issue in our state.  We propose a
  reasonable
  solution, shared responsibility with integrators and statewide standards
  based on
  sound science with modifications allowed based on a county's land use plans.
  We pride
  ourselves on our local control of schools and the empowerment of local
  officials to make
  decisions about a broad array of human services.  Aren't local officials as
  qualified to
  help make decisions about their environment?  Let's find a way to give local
  control to
  the siting and location of large livestock facilities.

  Will investing in our natural resources by being a national leader in
  private land
  conservation, our parks, our roadsides, and our trails lead to more Iowans,
  younger
  Iowans, and better-paid Iowans?  Let me tell you the story of Dave Carr and
  Mark
  Chelgren, co-founders of Frog Legs in Vinton.

  Dave grew up in Charles City, graduated in aerospace engineering from Iowa
  State,
  and did his graduate work in California.  He is a cyclist who has ridden 13
  RAGBRAIs,
  and RAGBRAI lured him and native Californian Mark Chelgren back in 1995.  A
  RAGBRAI connection took them to watch a wheelchair rugby match in Colorado.
  Why,
  they wondered, couldn't wheelchairs have the high-performance features of
  the high-
  tech mountain bikes they rode?  An idea was born. By this time, Mark had
  followed his
  heart back to Iowa to marry Janet Comer that he met on RAGBRAI.  The
  business was

© 2000 Cornell College and League of Women Voters of Iowa

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