STATEMENTS OF ARNIE J. SUOMELA, COMMISSIONER, U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR; AND DANIEL H. JANZEN, DIRECTOR, BUREAU OF SPORT FISHERIES AND WILDLIFE

Mr. SUOMELA. My name is Arnie J. Suomela, and I am the Commissioner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and with your permission, Mr. Chairman, I would like to read a short statement that I have.

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before the members of this committee for the purpose of providing information concerning the CCC program as it affected fish and wildlife conservation programs.

The report of the Department of the Interior on S. 812 dated May 11, 1959, is in the hands of this committee. I am not in a position to testify on such matters as the sociological, educational, economic, or budgetary considerations which must be weighed in arriving at a decision as to the desirability of this legislation.

I am here at the request of this committee, along with Mr. Janzen, Director of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, to provide background information pertinent to the subject matter of the bill.

During the period covered by the existence of the CCC organization, the Fish and Wildlife Service did not exist. The Bureau of Biological Survey, which is the wildlife portion of the Fish and Wildlife Service, was a part of the Department of Agriculture. The Bureau of Fisheries, formerly in the Department of Commerce, is now the sport fisheries part of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries of the Service. The consolidation took place in 1940.

Our records show that a total of 55 youth conservation camps were operated on wildlife refuges during the period the CCC project was in operation. They provided many major improvements. There were no camps connected with fisheries. However, they did provide assistance to fisheries research workers conducting programs on Forest Service lands. This service included mapping lakes, constructing stream improvement devices, mounting fish scales, and generally aiding those research programs which were intended to provide information to improve recreational fishing on Forest Service lands.

I was associated with the Bureau of Fisheries and had no direct association with the CCC program except for those services to fisheries which were obtained through the Forest Service on their lands. Consequently, I am not able to provide too much pertinent information.

Mr. Daniel Janzen, Director of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, was more directly associated with the program as it affected wildlife refuges. He should be able to answer more detailed questions on matters of interest to the committee.

Mr. MERRICK. The real question here is, firstly, the CCC type of relatively inexperienced person, to what extent is this person usable

by the Fish and Wildlife Service on some kind of an equal dollar-fordollar basis to the unskilled person you employ generally?

Mr. SUOMELA. I think I will have to turn that to Mr. Janzen. Mr. JANZEN. Well, it would be my opinion that the average CCC enrollee as we have in the past, and I would envision for the present, would probably represent a type of unskilled labor that we would ordinarily not use except on the most unskilled type of project, because they will really be boys with no experience.

Most of the unskilled labor that we now employ, of course we try to employ the most efficient type of unskilled labor who are farmer boys or people who were raised working with their hands and know how to work at unskilled projects.

These boys even have to be taught how to work with a pick and shovel.

Mr. MERRICK. To what extent is your annual budget used in relation to this kind of work?

Mr. JANZEN. I would not be able to answer that question. We could probably furnish the information.

Mr. MERRICK. Just in a general way.

Mr. JANZEN. No; I do not know what amount of our money goes into the hiring, but a very small percentage at the present time. Most of our employees on our refuges are civil service personnel technically trained. We try to contract as much of our work as we can, because we have found much of our work, building, dike construction, even fencing, can be done more reasonably by contracting out the work.

Mr. MERRICK. You bring up the point that I would ask about, the choice so far as you would be concerned, if we were to enact this YCC type of program, would be to what extent these boys earning in the neighborhood of $60 or so, something in that area a month, to what extent would they be useful to you in accomplishing programs?

Now, obviously, you pay your contracting out work on some considerably higher level of pay than this. In other words, it costs you more per man-hour. This does not necessarily mean that it costs you more for productive hour. Indeed, what you would say is that you make up a good deal by the fact that they are under regular work conditions.

The real question I would ask you, therefore, is to what extent, irrespective of the intangible values of the YCC program, to what extent you as a hard-shell bureaucrat would find it an advantage to have YCC boys doing the programing work that your Bureau normally handles?

Mr. JANZEN. It is a bit difficult to completely ignore the intangible values because the work that we are responsible for represents intangible values.

Mr. MERRICK. You are in the intangible value business.

Mr. JANZEN. That is right, and an appreciation of those intangible

values is a part of our business.

Mr. MERRICK. Sure.

Mr. JANZEN. And there is no question that under the old CCC program they did carry back home that appreciation and were able to convert others, you might say, to the cause.

Mr. MERRICK. I think that the point I make, though, is that let us make the effort for the moment at least to talk in terms of the dollar value, because in these budget-conscious days the committee has a problem in persuading the public that this is a good idea and if there are intangible values in addition to the same work content, the same taxpayer dollar use, well, we are that much in the clear.

Mr. JANZEN. Well, there is a great deal of work that is susceptible to the type of susceptible I think to efficient operations, using the type of labor that the CCC could furnish, for example, habitat improvement, tree planting, bird banding work, young fellows are often more valuable. Youth enthusiasm can sometimes make up for skill and we found that these young fellows could be taught how to run tractors and trucks, even on occasion we taught them to run drag lines, if they were retained on the job long enough.

I think that would be rather important that there be some provision for some of the fellows who wished to stay on who had learned some skills and make the value of the whole operation more valuable to the agency.

Mr. MERRICK. The bill as presently envisioned allows a percentage of persons to be employed over this critical youthful age. The old CCC as I understand it, permitted a maximum of 2 years; conceivably a 2-year maximum with an additional year or two for supervision qualification might be effective.

Mr. JANZEN. I would see there that what happened in the old CCC that these enrollees eventually ended up with those more permanent jobs.

Mr. MERRICK. Right.

Mr. JANZEN. As they were recognized by the operating agency, they were selected as they left and given better jobs.

Mr. MERRICK. Now, the Park Service has this Mission 66, and the Forest Service has its equivalent long-range program and short-range program. Is there such a thing that your Service has developed in any form that would be usable by the committee? Have you got, in other words, a looking ahead program that you could point to or that we could read somewhere!

Mr. JANZEN. Ever since the days of the CCC and WPA we have tried to maintain a type of construction program always with the possibility that there might again be some emergency program and we would not be caught quite as flatfooted as we were in the old days. We have nothing, I think that-we might have some information, yes, I should not say we do not have information. Yes; we do have information.

Mr. MERRICK. Would you consider this something that the subcommittee would appreciate and like to have for its record, that you maybe could figure out for us in the next week or so, some idea of this, its cost and most importantly, to what extent the program could be economically performed, and I want to make this point, economically performed by the CCC type of enrollee?

Mr. JANZEN. Yes, sir.

use.

I wanted to inject one question here with respect to this economic As you probably recollect during the old CCC days only a fraction of the CCC boys were available for operations. It took a very substantial part of their labor to take care of the housekeeping of the

CCC camp itself, and I presume that we can estimate it on the basis of the labor that has been made available for this work, not the overhead labor.

Mr. WOLF. On that point, as long as you do not differentiate or imply that the CCC labor would be siphoned off, let's say, for housekeeping and the same thing would not be true of any other labor that you might have.

Mr. JANZEN. That is true.

Mr. WOLF. In other words, it should be on a comparable basis. It seems to me if you are going to hire, let us say, 500 men to improve wildlife refuge you are going to have the same problem whether they are YCC type people or people that you put on under the wage board. Mr. JANZEN. In our type of work we do not hire a group of people like that. We hire local people and we do not provide housing or facilities. They have to take care of themselves. They are just hired for the number of days that they are on the job.

Mr. WOLF. Then I would say in preparing the analysis that you would have to take into account the salary differential.

Mr. JANZEN. Yes, sir.

Mr. WOLF. The YCC people at so much a month plus subsistence and quarters, compared to the wage board wage you would pay to any other people who you might hire or as the forester testified this morning they sometimes hire wage-board people and then substract subsistence and quarters which they furnish to them. So that would then reconvert it to a comparabe basis.

Mr. JANZEN. Yes. We can work up a statement on that, sir.

Mr. WOLF. There was one other question I had. When you said you didn't have figures, does that mean Fish and Wildlife Service operates on a year-to-year basis without any long range plans?

Mr. JANZEN. We have a backlog of work. I would have to do a little going over to get it up to date just for what you want here. We have it, yes.

Mr. WOLF. You do have some sort of 3- or 5-year program that is used in your normal budget process of things you think should be done in order to make wildlife refuge system most effective from a conservation standpoint?

Mr. JANZEN. Actually, I think our backlog is based on total full development. Our problem has been that we have not been able to work out the long-range plan on every project as we would like to. But we do have a pretty complete long-range plan that will be necessary to actually develop the areas to their optimum production.

Mr. WOLF. You would have a more detailed short range 3- to 5-year program that is used in your day-to-day operations?

Mr. JANTZEN. Yes. That is right, sir.

Mr. WOLF. Don't you think, Mr. Merrick, that would be the type of thing, if that is the most readily available, that would give us some idea of the contribution?

Mr. MERRICK. I think if you could give it to us both without too much time intervening, that would be desirable.

Mr. JANZEN. I will see see what I can do about that, yes sir. (The information is as follows:)

The Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife administers 260 national wildlife refuges, totaling 16,748,840 acres in the United States and Alaska.

During the period 1934-40, a total of 55 Civilian Conservation Corps camps were in operation at one time or another on 49 refuges covering 2,684,235 acres. (Statistics as of July 1, 1940.) In addition, a small amount of CCC labor was made available to the fish hatchery program from camps operated by the U.S. Forest Service.

During the same period a total of 4,692,756 man-days of CCC enrollee labor, and $6,819,932 of CCC funds for materials, equipment, and skilled labor were made available to the national wildlife refuges by the CCC program. We estimate that on the average it took four enrollees to perform the same work performed by the average unskilled laborer ordinarily hired locally at wage board rates. The current (1959) average wage board rates for unskilled labor runs from $1 to $2 per 8-hour day.

It is estimated that of the $57 million backlog of conservation, construction, and rehabilitation projects required to bring existing refuges and fish hatcheries to full utilization or production, 41 percent could be performed with the CCC type of program, assuming the program would have funds available for skilled labor, supervision, materials and equipment required to supplement the enrollee labor. Such supplementary fund requirements during the former CCC program involved about 25 percent of the total CCC appropriation.

It must be kept in mind that while 41 percent of the projects can utilize unskilled labor of the CCC enrollee type, the fish hatchery rehabilitation and development projects (11 percent of the 41 percent) require such comparatively small amounts of unskilled labor that the practicability of applying the CCC type of program to these projects will depend entirely on whether small details (5 to 25 men) can be efficiently assigned from their housing location as required by the individual hatcheries.

Senator RANDOLPH. We thank you very very much, Mr. Suomela and Mr. Janzen for giving this testimony, supplying us with the material which has been requested. Thank you.

Mr. SUOMELA. Thank you.

Mr. JANZEN. Thank you.

Senator RANDOLPH. Mr. Young.

Mr. Young, you are from the Department of Agriculture, the Deputy Administrator of the Soil Conservation Service?

Mr. YOUNG. Yes, sir.

STATEMENT OF GLADWIN E. YOUNG, DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR, SOIL CONSERVATION SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

Senator RANDOLPH. We are very happy to have your assistance in the discussion which is taking place on this bill.

Mr. YOUNG. Thank you, sir.

I understand that the Forest Service was here this morning and testified to your subcommittee. I also understand that an official statement of the Department of Agriculture with respect to this bill has been submitted to your committee.

Senator RANDOLPH. Yes.

Mr. YOUNG. I am not sure how background information from the Soil Conservation Service would be helpful in the consideration of this bill. I have no prepared statement, but I would like to review with you briefly the general work of the Soil Conservation Service and perhaps that may lead to questions that you would like to ask about it.

As you know, the Soil Conservation Service has no public land under its jurisdiction.

We work entirely with individual farmers and ranchers and through the soil conservation districts that are formed in all of the States. Our work involves the providing of technical assistance to farmers