ustxtxb_obs_1982_04_23_50_00030-00000_000.pdf

that my mind can be changed and my opinion can be changed. I think Gramm is the same type of person. Once his mind is made up that something is bad then he’s going to try to prove that it is bad. I would rather look at it and let it prove itself. What areas do you think Gramm has written off as bad? I think the transfer-type payment programs: CETA is one of the first he took on as being bad. Let’s talk about your CETA experience. Sure. How many years were you in CETA. Seven. And what did you do? I was everything from being a counselor to a director and became an assistant executive director for Human Services at the Council \(Brazos Valley DeWhen you were talking about continuing resolutions and the pressure to spend money you were talking about your experience with CETA weren’t you? Yes. And my military experience. Just general observations about how government functions. And that’s one of the things that appalls me about government-granting appropriations and programs, that agencies are penalized for not spending money. And I think that’s a contradiction . . . There shouldn’t be this mad rush to spend money. And they’ve tightened it up in the sense that they’ve tried to control the last 90 days and say you can’t spend but at a certain rate the last quarter. The CETA program got a lot of bad press. I suppose it was because of that same situation. Pressure to spend money. There was too much money dumped too fast in the network. CETA was one of the most complicated kinds of programs to handle I think. They needed probably a year or a good year-and-ahalf just to establish the network, set it up, get the regulations ironed out. Too many do’s and don’ts in the thing prevented it from running smoothly and that sort of thing. . . . Do you think the problem is inherent in any federal program or do you think it can be worked out? Well, accountability is part of the problem. There’s a tremendous demand on the part of the public to make the program more accountable. That I can understand but we have to do it with legislation and then it becomes more cumbersome. But if you contrast it with General Revenue Sharing you know where you give it to cities and counties 30 APRIL 23, 1982 and you give them a broader range of things they can use it for. . . . How successful do you think CETA was? I think it was successful. When you talk about success you have to look at different parts of the country. This is one of the few programs that had noble purposes from the very outset But before it got underway the whole direction was changed. It came out as a program to train and employ economically disadvantaged people. It was signed into law in November of 1973 by Nixon. That means the money didn’t start flowing until sometime in 1974. In 1974 we had the recession. So immediately, they cranked in a lot of money for publicservice-employment jobs as a means to stimulate the economy. So all of a sudden, instead of being programmed to train a lot of economically disadvantaged people, it became a tool in the economic program. So it was manipulated from the very outset. . . . The other problem with CETA was that it was a grab bag for everybody. Everybody that needed some money or some help went to the national level, and they said go to CETA. If you need people go to CETA. So they’d come back to the local level and start taking it out of the bag. This is why so many programs were affected when CETA went under. In the first Title Six there was a notion that only ten % of the jobs could be professional and we probably had less than one or two % of the jobs that were classified as professional. There were many programs in the country that had a professional look to them. Many satisfied those requirements by hiring recently graduated college students. So there were different twists all over the place. Was most of your work in CETA with blacks? About 60% of our participants were blacks. There is still a big problem here isn’t there? There’s a tremendous problem. Of the five counties I worked with in the 6th District, even though the unemployment rate is low you see the same pattern that exists nationally, and that is the unemployment for the blacks is two or three times that for whites. The highest of all groups is black females. Not only that, but isn’t there a problem with the types of jobs that blacks are getting? Sure, there’s a tremendous problem in terms of the quality of work the type jobs blacks are getting. I remember one frustrated person coming to me when I first got there and crying and I had known this person when I was in high school. Now in that time, which may have been 20 years while I had gone to college and the service and other things, she had been a maid at A&M. She came in and said she was tired of scrubbing floors on her knees and that struck me as something unfortunate. But that was a time when opportunities weren’t available. . . . Do you think it has gotten much better? I think visibility is better. I think fundamentally there are still some problems. By visibility I mean you can now go into banks or stores and see blacks working as clerks. It makes me feel good in that respect. But having seen the kinds of people who come in and the kinds of problems they are encountering, I still believe there is a fundamental problem. . . . I remember at a BVDC meeting once you made a plea to the country judges to notify the businesses that they were going to have to start helping out. They were going to have to change their attitude. How effective do you think that speech was? I wasn’t very effective. Not that they weren’t listening. Not that they didn’t believe what I was saying. It’s just that generally there isn’t that kind of posturing on the part of those kinds of officials. You know they just generally don’t go to the Chamber of Commerce and make a pitch like that. But I was trying to appeal to them as leaders of the community to be bold and take the step, but a lot of them don’t see that as being their role. This was at a time when public-service employment was coming down, and there was an increased emphasis on private-sector involvement, and figuring that county judges are the leaders of their community and prominent members of each county, then you go to that top official. But you didn’t get much response. No, I don’t think so. And Gramm was part of this problem because he was castigating CETA at the time and so it compounded our ability to approach the concept . . . So why should I get involved with it. So there was money appropriated for us to help people and here’s your Congressman coming around and saying don’t do a damn thing. Either he’s against the program itself or he’s not for helping the people and either way there is money out in the system to pull it off and I think that was the worst thing he could have done. . . . So you have a faith in federal programs. I have a faith only in the sense that, 41: ,17.”..v. -worwA-.# 4..00.4.4.064,-…ewese4.011M*4kw-,01,,7! _