will recognize the gentleman from Iowa for some short comments or questions.

Please, Mr. Smith.

Mr. SMITH. Mr. Secretary, until very recently either by legislation or regulation, smaller communities were arbitrarily eliminated from the benefits of many Federal programs.

I think the situation Mr. Horton describes is not unusual. That is where there is an industry in a central location within commuting distance. People really do not have to have the industry in the small

town.

What they want to do is live there.

If they can commute, if they can get a housing loan, if there is sewer and water, that is where they want to live. So really the sewer and water loans program passed in the last Congress together with housing loans are the real keys to helping them and the small towns survive, aren't they?

Secretary FREEMAN. Yes. I think they are very, very critical and important keys to it along with some of the conservation and resource development programs.

Mr. KLUCZYNSKI. Mr. Dingell, a short question.

Mr. DINGELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to join with the chairman in welcoming two very fine members of the President's Cabinet here today. They do this committee great honor, and we certainly are privileged to have them here before us.

Gentlemen, I have just one question, and this is one that has troubled me for a long time.

I represent a district composed of some 13 or 14 communities and about every time I turn around a new area is incorporated. One of the great problems these new areas have is funding water and sewer facilities. This is a matter we have been much concerned about here in Washington.

I can think of at least three programs for this purpose, and I believe there is a fourth. The first of these is the Department of Agriculture's program for $50 million.

Then there is, of course, the very fine program in the Department of Housing and Urban Development which has $100 million for water and sewer projects. Unfortunately, this program is oversubscribed by about $2.7 billion to $100 million as I understand the last figure. I suspect it may have risen somewhat more since I received this figure.

And finally, there is Public Law 660, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, which dates back to 1956, for which $450 million is authorized and $230 million requested.

One of the problems I face as a Member of Congress when my people come down here to participate in one of these programs or to seek participation on a grant basis is the fact that they literally do not know where to go and are bounced from hither to thither. This is particularly true with respect to those from small communities that would be eligible for the small communities development program which falls under the Department of Agriculture.

My concern is twofold, gentlemen.

One, doesn't it appear to be better to incorporate all of these many programs into one piece of legislation in one agency, and, two, if that is not possible, can we please work out some better devices for coordinating these programs so that the communities will be able to know better where to go to get the money that they so desperately need to construct these sewers and water pollution abatement projects. Secretary FREEMAN. Well, No. 1, if the communities-we have made a real effort to do this and I think have worked out the relationship. If the community is 5,500 or fewer in population, it would come within the province of the Farmers Home Administration and assuming that it can qualify for a loan there and assuming further that we have some funds left, that loan ought to be forthcoming.

Now, if there is a technical difficulty of some kind which disqualifies but might not in another program or if funds are not available and might be in another program, this is an open question depending upon the circumstances.

But I would say to you, Congressman, that if there is one of these communities that does not know where to go here, we would hope we could be of assistance because it ought to start in the Department of Agriculture.

Mr. DINGELL. My problem is that by the time they finish running between the different places, the money is all gone.

This is a very serious problem.

Now, Secretary Weaver has been very helpful to me and made available a very generous grant to one of my communities for a community program. But it was through a special kindness from his office that we were able to get the redtape cut. I still have the fundamental problem of having the people chase back and forth to obtain this money.

I think this is a very great problem that merits the attention of you gentlemen in the Cabinet so that these four programs can be sufficiently coordinated that when representatives from a small town come here they will know which of the agencies they should contact to get the money. I feel so strongly about this that I have introduced legislation to have them all administered by one agency.

It is a matter of really small concern which agency administers them as long as we get one place for them to go.

I think this is a problem you are going to face not just on air pollution or water pollution but everywhere. There is such a tremendous number of Federal programs that we have to give serious thought to getting related programs in one place so we do not go from Agriculture to HUD to HEW to Interior. It is pretty hard for a Member of Congress with 13 communities to figure out where to send his people and how to get some money before it runs out.

Secretary FREEMAN. I would say better than that, it should not be necessary for people to have to come to Washington at all. Certainly there are very, very few instances that an application for an FHA loan comes to Washington. The Administrator of that program-Howard, how many programs come to Washington of the 1,700 that we made last year roughly?

Mr. BERTSCH. Ten percent perhaps, Mr. Secretary.

Secretary FREEMAN. Well, that is a higher number than I thought but these ought to be done and done locally and they ought not to be that complicated, and

Mr. DINGELL. I don't want to transgress on the committee's time. I know Secretary Weaver has been very patient. But I am sincerely troubled about this fact, and I want my people to come to Washington so that I can help them and watch over them and see that things go the way they should go for them.

But I am greatly troubled. This is not the only area where we have this where-do-we-go-to-get-the-money problem. I think I am as astute about getting money as anybody else around here, but the truth is we have so many places to go that it is really hurting the programs. I think, Mr. Secretary, this is something both of you very fine gentlemen should look at very carefully when you get back down

town.

Secretary FREEMAN. Thank you.

Mr. KLUCZYNSKI. Thank you, Mr. Dingell.

We also have with us Mr. Mize, a Representative from Kansas who is very much interested in small businessmen. He is not going to ask any questions, cooperating with the chairman.

At this time I yield to my very good friend, Mr. Burton of Utah. Mr. BURTON. Mr. Chairman, I won't take any time other than to say that I think you put your finger on one of our major national problems, Mr. Secretary. I come from a State that is suffering under the situation you have described.

Thank you for your statement.

Secretary FREEMAN. Thank you.

Mr. KLUCZYNSKI. Mr. Secretary, we are glad to have you with us. I want to thank you. Your testimony is going to help this committee when we sit in executive session.

Secretary FREEMAN. I want to thank want to thank you for your courtesy. It has been a pleasure to be here and I leave Mr. Weaver to your very generous, kindly, perceptive, intelligent, penetrating remarks.

Mr. KLUCZYNSKI. He is a great man.

Additional material submitted by Secretary Freeman will, without objection, be inserted in the record at this point. (The information referred to follows:)

THE ISSUE OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT: COMMUNITIES OF TOMORROW 1

We are now seven years into the seventh decade of the Twentieth Century, poised at a point in time when fundamental, widespread and irreversible change in the fabric of the United States is occurring daily.

Thirty-three years ahead of us lies the dawn of a new century. And if that date has the ring of the far-distant future, it might be well to recall just how short a period three decades really is.

We are equidistant in time today from the year 2000 and the year 1934, the second year of the New Deal. Rural America then, as now, was in crisis, but of a different order-a crisis highly visible, affecting almost the total rural population, and part of a larger economic crisis affecting the entire Nation.

The Nation responded to this crisis, creating agencies and programs to conserve the soil, to bring electricity to the countryside, to bring agricultural supply and demand in balance, and a host of other measures which fundamentally altered the condition of American life.

1 Address by Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman at Conference on Rural Poverty, sponsored by National Association for Community Development, Marriott Motor Inn, Twin Bridges, Arlington, Va., January 30, 1967.

What we did then profoundly affected what we are today.

Now, 33 years later, we face crisis of another order-just as acute, just as widespread as the crisis in the thirties, but with this fundamental difference: Today's crisis in rural America is a hidden crisis, largely invisible, and largely overshadowed by other, more spectacular problems at home and abroad.

DIMENSIONS OF THE CRISIS

The dimensions of the crisis are well known to all of you who are deeply involved in rural development. They consist of too little of everything-jobs, income, education, and services-in rural America, and a continuing one-way flow of people from country to city, damaging to country and city alike.

The crisis is neither simple nor easy of solution. It is complex, multi-faceted, and feeds upon itself. Less economic opportunity in rural America means fewer jobs; underemployment means a lower tax base; a lower tax base means poorer community facilities and education; crippled education and facilities bring the problem full circle by discouraging industry from locating in rural areas.

The result has been a rural America with space to spare, but starved for opportunity-and paradoxically an urban America with oportunity for the many, but starved for space for her residents to move in, to enjoy, to breathe.

Rural residents have roughly half the number of doctors per 100,000 people as city people; a third of the number of dentists. The amount of underemployment in rural America is equivalent to 2.5 million unemployed. 6.8 million rural homes are in need of repairs and 30,000 rural communities need improved water and sewer systems. The educational achievement rate is some two years behind that of urban America and the dropout rate is 7 percent higher than in urban

areas.

THE CITY TODAY

An unplanned policy of exporting rural problems to the city has drawn urban America into the rural crisis. For the affluent of the city, the unchecked migration means more crowding, higher taxes, more hours consumed in commuting as urban sprawl continues unabated. For migrants already in the teeming ghettos, further immigration means less opportunity and rising despair. One urban observer put it this way:

"Our cities exact too much from those who live in them. They are not only increasingly expensive places in which to live or work; more and more, the price of city living is being paid by a sacrifice of fundamental personal freedoms:" The author of these words is no agrarian fundamentalist; he is Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York City.

THE CITY TOMORROW

By the turn of the century, if present trends continue unchecked, Mayor Lindsay's New York will have become part of a super megalopolis stretching from present-day Boston south to Washington, D.C., and containing 56 million people. This strip city, and 4 other strips like it, will house 174 million Americans on urbanized land ranging in density from 660 to 2,600 people per square mile. Residents of these 5 super strip cities and other urbanized areas will get up earlier, spend more time breathing their neighbors' car exhaust and return home later. Superhighways and mass transit systems will soak up increasing amounts of urban land in a frantic race to keep the city mobile. If past trends are an indication, crimes of violence will increase as urban life becomes increasingly more depersonalized and hopeless for the disadvantaged.

Nor can we count with any certainty on being rescued by technology from such a reckless concentration of people, vehicles and industry. The number of automobiles is increasing at a rate twice that of U.S. population. By the year 2000 we will have an estimated 200 million cars in the U.S.-nearly 3 times as many as today. With this many mobile pollution sources crowded into 9 percent of the land area, even the most stringent anti-pollution ordinances will do little more than preserve the status quo, if that. Pollutants produced by industry, sewage plants and land development, will increase apace.

This is the world we're building, simply by allowing present trends to continue to their logical conclusion-for powerful, yet unplanned, forces are tending in the direction of even further imbalance.

CENTRALIZATION FACTORS

1. One of these is tradition. The farm-to-city migration has been under way for a hundred years or more. Cities have traditionally offered better wages, education, community facilities, and cultural activities than rural areas. Both the city and the countryside have undergone tremendous change in recent years, and now many rural communities offer as much as the central city . . . and a great deal more that the urban complex cannot offer. Yet the tug of traditional thinking is strong, both on the average citizen and on those who make the plantlocation decisions.

2. A second factor encouraging centralization can be summed up as, "them as has, gits." Those areas which already have industry attract more, and this in turn attracts even more. The sprawling electronics complex in Southern California is an example. Although overcrowding, increased taxation and snarled transportation in urban areas are making rural locations increasingly attractive, the lure of established commerce still is a powerful force.

3. A third factor is negative, but quite possibly more important than the other two combined: We lack any accepted national goal in rural/urban balance. We have never seriously asked-let alone answered-questions like these: "What is a desirable maximum size for any one metropolitan area?" "How much weight should be given to rural/urban balance in the location of government facilities and awarding of contracts?" "Are more Federal incentives desirable to encourage rural development? If so, how much?" "What are the social costs involved in this unplanned population shift?"

In the absence of a national policy in this matter, decisions in industrial location, government installations, contract awards, and government program expenditures all tend to favor urban areas.

A continued unplanned stacking up of more people in urban areas, at the expense of rural areas, is a national drift that bodes ill for the future. No one planned it this way; like Topsy, "It just grew." Nobody really wants an America of super strip cities, dotted with explosive and squalid ghettoes. It is not too much to call such a drift "national idiocy," and it does no good to offer palliatives and pills to cure a disease which has literally assumed epidemic proportions.

THE NEW AWARENESS

Working against this centralizing drift, fortunately, is the flickering beginning of a national awareness of the relationship between urban and rural problems, and a growing commitment to meeting the problems in rural America, rather than exporting them.

Author J. P. Lyford, in his book on the New York slums, "The Airtight Cage, articulates this new awareness by asking:

"Why, for instance, must huge concentrations of unemployed and untrained human beings continue to pile up in financially unstable cities that no longer have the jobs, the housing, the educational opportunities, or any of the other prerequisites for a healthy and productive life? Why do we treat the consequences and ignore the causes of massive and purposeless migration to the city? Why are we not developing new uses for those rural areas that are rapidly becoming depopulated? Why do we still instinctively deal with urban and rural America as if they were separate, conflicting interests when in fact neither interest can be served independently of the other?"

The President, speaking last September in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, said: "Not just sentiment demands that we do more to help our farms and rural communities. . . . The welfare of this Nation demands it . . . Must we export our youth to the cities faster than we export our corps and our livestock to market? I believe we can do something about this."

We can :

Urban America, according to its spokesmen, can easily absorb one trillion dollars to make existing cities livable. Certainly we should bend every effort to make them livable. But at the same time we should devote much more to building rural America than we have done in the past, to head off even more virulent attacks of urban decay occasioned by uncontrolled growth in the future. Doing this will cost less and get better results.