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Mr. POMEROY. Final question, Mr. Chairman. As an administra- 

 tion official responsible for implementing that policy, is it your view 

 that present statute or regulations give you no ability to weigh 

 competing uses? 



Mr. Hebert. No, I would not say that is the case. There are im- 

 plicit and explicit within the programs that we administer at 

 USDA a look at competing uses. For instance, the swampbuster 

 program does include a mitigation provision by which a farmer 

 making the determination that they need to have a particular part 

 of their field converted, in carrying out that conversion would also 

 go through a mitigation process. There are examples of that in cur- 

 rent wetlands policy, perhaps a little more limited in USDA's pro- 

 gram as compared to the Corps program. 



I would like to add one thing. The administration's position talks 

 about making movement toward managing wetlands on a water- 

 shed basis. That is a unit of Government or geographical jurisdic- 

 tion that we can begin to think about the types of issues that you 

 are raising. But that is still in development and we need to talk 

 about it a lot more. I think it holds a great deal of promise for ad- 

 dressing the kinds of problems that you are raising. 



Mr. PoMEROY. I commend you for your responses this morning 

 and look forward to working with you. 



Mr. Chairman, I have a conflict. I will be back as soon as that 

 is resolved. 



Mr. Johnson. Mr. Peterson. 



Mr. Peterson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I represent the area 

 right across the river from Mr. Pomeroy. We have similar kinds of 

 concerns and I could cite similar anecdotes. 



But we have another problem. I was reading your testimony 

 about how you want to cooperate with the local folks and you want 

 to make this process work. I just want you to be aware of what is 

 happening. The Corps of Engineers, in their wisdom, put a morato- 

 rium on permits in my district and they didn't do anything across 

 the river in North Dakota which has just as much water coming 

 in as comes in from my side. We have been kind of going back and 

 forth. They claim they needed 2 years to figure out a plan so they 

 could decide whether to give permits or not. 



They are still monkeying around and going through some scoping 

 deal and, in the meantime, they have everything tied up. Now we 

 have a real active watershed area; the whole area is set up in wa- 

 tershed districts. These are the folks I think you are talking about 

 that you want to work with. What has happened is they have put 

 all their projects on hold because of this situation. I took the posi- 

 tion to put pressure on that if they are going to do this they ought 

 to put everything on hold. Now they come back and they want to 

 say, well, we want to exempt the Fish and Wildlife from the DNR; 

 we don't want them to be held up, we only want the watershed dis- 

 tricts to be held up. 



I commend what you are saying but I just want you to under- 

 stand that there are some places where this is not what is happen- 

 ing. Things are worse rather than better out there. There is going 

 to be less cooperation, not more, if we don't figure out some way 

 to resolve this. I have found no one that wants to really help us 

 resolve this. The person that is in charge of the Corps in my area 



