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Mr. President, this legislation has a fairly long history. It involves 

 31/^ years of work by me. It involves the feeling of people in my State, 

 rightly or wrongly, that they have been shortchanged, both by the 

 Supreme Court and by Congress, in the treatment of Outer Continen- 

 tal Shelf revenues and production. We may be wrong about that. We 

 may be parochial in that feeling, but we have felt it, and we have felt 

 it intensely for a long time. 



Accordingly, Mr. President, we began to work 31/2 years ago to try 

 to correct what we regard as a very unjust situation ; to try to get some 

 share of revenues from the Outer Continental Shelf to aid in the im- 

 pact which the Outer Continental Shelf development has had on 

 Louisiana. 



The Federal Government has impact aid funds for virtually every- 

 thing. If a military base is put in an area, the Government will give im- 

 pact aid because of the lost taxes to that area. Areas get impact aid for 

 timber cutting by the Federal Government on Federal lands. Areas 

 get impact aid for extracting any kind of mineral from any federally 

 owned lands. Louisiana thought she should get some modicum of that 

 same treatment. 



So the Interior Committee had hearings, Louisiana justified its 

 cause, and we passed a bill affording favorable treatment three times 

 on the floor of the Senate. The last time we passed it, we had what I 

 thought was an agreement that the impact aid funds would be attached 

 to the coastal zone management bill. We thought the agreement was 

 that those funds would survive the conference. There is no need to go 

 into all the provisions of that agreement between the Senate Commerce 

 and Interior Committees. I could read the provisions or put them in 

 the Record. 



Suffice it to say that in my judgment, those provisions are explicit. 

 They constitute more than a gentleman's agreement. They constitute 

 a specific agreement, spread on the records of the Senate. 



Relationships between Senators, I suppose, is a matter of concern 

 not for the Senate as a whole or as an institution but, rather, for those 

 Senators involved. But relationships between committees, when spread 

 on the Congressional Record, are matters that the Senate should 

 be concerned about. I am deeply concerned and I am deeply disap- 

 pointed by the action of the conference committee, because I think the 

 Interior Committee has been done in. 



To be sure, Mr. President, the ultimate cause of this is the adminis- 

 tration. The same administration which, after many conversations, 

 led me to believe, through Secretary Morton, that they had lots of 

 sympathy for the States which were upholding their part of the Na- 

 tion's needs by allowing drilling for oil and gas off their shores and 

 suffering the impacts that activity brings. The administration indi- 

 cated that we, at least should get some kind of reasonable impact aid. 

 I was led to believe that they suggested the automatic impact grant 

 concept. 



I do not charge that there was a specific breach of a specific promise, 

 but at least this was my understanding of their intentions. 



I can understand the spot that the conferees w^ere in. They were 

 told — and it was repeated to me today by the Deputy Under Secretary 

 of Commerce — that if they allowed these provisions to survive in 

 this bill, the President would veto it. I believe that veto would have 



