NATIONAL CAPITAL PARK AND PLANNING COMMISSION,
Washington, March 28, 1952.

Hon. BURNET R. MAYBANK,

Chairman, Subcommittee for Independent Offices Appropriation Bill,
United States Senate Appropriations Committee,
Washington 25, D. C.

DEAR SENATOR MAYBANK: This Commission appreciates your kind letter of March 17, 1952, and respectfully requests a hearing before your subcommittee in order to justify an appeal, summarized as follows, from the 89 percent appropriation reduction voted by the House:

Activity

Budget estimate

Approved
by House

Revised estimate now requested

George Washington Parkway in Fairfax County, Va..
Extension of valley parks to Maryland.
District of Columbia parks and playgrounds...

The Commission is now working on the portion of this parkway running upstream from Memorial Bridge on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. The section from Memorial Bridge to Spout Run near Key Bridge is completed, including the lin ited access roadway. Requisition of land is nearing completion in the next section, from Spout Run to the Arlington-Fairfax County line near Chain Bridge.

The 1953 estimate is designed to extend the parkway out of the valley of Pimmit Run and up to the highway that connects Chain Bridge with Leesburg. Maps showing the value of this connection will be turned over to the subcommittee at the hearing.

The proposed unit is estimated to cost $150,000, one-half of which is to be paid by Virginia and the other half by the Federal Government. The Virginia “matching funds" have already been committed by Virginia and Fairfax County. The difficult position in which the Commission now finds itself is best described in the follow ing editorial, which appeared in the Washington Evening Star on March 22, 1952, under the title of "A Matter of Good Faith":

"However well-intentioned, the economy efforts of the House Appropriations Committee were misdirected when the group eliminated from the Park and Planning Commission's budget at $75,000 item for the George Washington Memorial Parkway. A matter of good faith is involved. The Federal Government should not run out on its promise to proceed at once with purchase of land for the parkway in Fairfax County, provided the county and the State of Virginia appropriated their shares of the cost. Virginia, acting on that promise, has carried out its part of the bargain. It is up to the United States to fulfill its commitment. "But for this commitment the general assembly never would have voted funds for the project at the session recently ended. Nor would Fairfax County have allocated from its meager treasury $37,500 toward the parkway extension plan. The legislature's contribution of $150,000 was designed to meet the State's share of the undertaking for the ensuing 2 years. Under the three-way agreement on the parkway, the Federal Government has pledged itself to put up half of the total cost of the land, with the State and Fairfax County splitting the remainder. During the fiscal year beginning July 1 the cost of land buying to the Federal Government has been estimated at $75,000, which sum was to be matched by a Statecounty allocation.

"The Park and Planning Commission, which has the responsibility of acquiring the right-of-way for the parkway, has been urging Virginia authorities to meet their obligations this year. The Commission has found that delay in buying land means higher costs, for realty values are steadily rising in the area through which the highway will pass. The cost of building the parkway to its present terminus in Arlington County, at Lorcom Lane, was greatly increased by past delays. To postpone scheduled extension of the road indefinitely would be not only a breach of the original agreement but an act of false economy as well.”

II. SUBURBAN MARYLAND STREAM VALLEY PARKS

The House Appropriations Committee, in rejecting the $459,000 budget estimate for this program, indicated that it intends to pursue such a policy "until the present international difficulties have subsided.”

Undoubtedly the House committee did not understand that to delay these particular projects on the Maryland side of Washington would actually result in the abandonment of them and not merely the postponement of putting them into effect until after the international crisis has passed. Two earlier financial crises (the depth of the depression in the mid-1930's and the peak of World War II were successfully weathered because real estate development came to a standstill

at the same time. There is no such reduction in home building to accompany the House-proposed cessation of park acquisition in the present emergency.

The Commission feels that it has the duty to point out to Congress that the break, which undoubtedly would be caused in parkways leading to and from the Nation's Capital under the drastic reduction made by the House, may be avoided if Congress will provide sufficient funds to permit this Commission to operate in 1953 under a provision of section 1 (b) of the Capper-Cramton Act which has heretofore been found to be virtually impossible to employ.

For the past 21 years Congress has always acted under the last proviso of section 1 (b) of the act. That provision authorized Congress to appropriate the entire amount of the cost of each park unit. One-third of each such amount was a Federal grant and the other two-thirds was an advance made to the Maryland authorities as a loan, as authorized by the provisɔ.

We now propose, because of the emergency conditions, that this 21-year-old policy be temporarily set aside and that under the other provisions of section 1 (b) Congress appropriate for purposes of the Federal grant only. The restriction of funds to that use should be stated unequivocally in the appropriation language. Thus Congress is in a position to satisfy the minimum needs of this program at a cost of $153,000 instead of $459,000. The same number of acres, all of which are vital to the survival of the park plan, can be obtained in fiscal year 1953, but, at the same time, a reduction of $306,000 can be made in this Commission's budget estimate of $600,000 without doing one iota of harm.

This new financing policy, which is commended to you most urgently, recently was cleared by the Bureau of the Budget and has received the reluctant consent of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.

Accordingly it is recommended that the Senate amend the bill as follows (references are to H. R. 7072 as reported to the House):

1. Page 29, line 8, strike "section 4 of".

2. Page 29, line 8, immediately following the parenthesis and comma, add “as amended by the Act of August 8, 1946 (60 Stat. 960),".

3. Page 23, line 14, strike “$66,000”.

4. Page 29, line 14, immediately following the word "expended" strike the colon and insert the following language: ", $234,000, of which (a) $75,000 shall be available for the purposes of section 1 (a) of said Act of May 29, 1930, (b) $153,000 shall be available for contributions by the United States for the purposes of section 1 (b) thereof, and (c) $66,000 shall be available for the purposes of section 4 thereof:".

INTRODUCTION OF GENERAL COUNSEL

Senator MAYBANK. You proceed in your own way.

Mr. NOLEN. All right, sir. I would like, if it is my privilege at the beginning of this hearing, to introduce a new member of our staff. Senator MAYBANK. We will be happy to have you do that.

Mr. NOLEN. He is Mr. William S. Cheatham. He was indoctrinated in the Senate side of this Congress, where he was employed for 26 years, beginning as a Senate page. He is our new general counsel and secretary and takes the place of Tom Settle, who was with the Commission for 20 years and who has retired.

Mr. Chairman, this request that we are presenting to you today is, we feel, in full recognition of the current budget situation and, as you indicated in your opening statement, we have changed our request as submitted to the House and are now submitting to you a request to restore only 40 percent of that which the House cut from our budget.

That changes our total from $600,000, as originally estimated to the House, to $294,000. That is broken down into three major items.

GEORGE WASHINGTON MEMORIAL PARKWAY

One is a request for $75,000 for the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Fairfax County, Va., under section 1 (a) of the authorizing act; another is $153,000 for the extension of the stream valley parks in

Maryland under section 1 (b) of the authorizing legislation, and finally $66,000, which was approved by the House, for District parks and playgrounds, making a total of $294,000.

Senator MAYBANK. You are talking about items 1 and 2. How much of those items will Virginia and Maryland pay?

Mr. NOLEN. Under item 1 Virginia matches the funds expended by the Federal Government. In other words, Virginia contributes 50 percent to the complete project.

In Maryland the system is a little different. The law provides that the United States may advance and contribute funds for the extension of the District parks into Maryland. The contributions would be one-third and the advance may be two-thirds.

In our request to the House we included the total money needed for the contribution and advance. In our amended request, being submitted to the Senate, we are only including the contribution money, namely, one-third of that which was requested for this item in the budget submitted to the House.

Mr. Lee is going to present to you the background for that amended request.

ORIGINAL BUDGET REQUEST

Senator MAYBANK. Let me ask you something. The Budget Bureau approved how much?

Mr. NOLEN. The Budget Bureau approved $600,000.

Senator MAYBANK. How much did you ask for?

Mr. NOLEN. We asked originally for $1,777,000.

Senator MAYBANK. In other words, they cut you two-thirds?
Mr. NOLEN. That is right.

COMPREHENSIVE PARKWAY PLAN

Before I turn this further testimony over to Mr. Lee, I would like to orient the request to these three maps, which are all identical. They show the relationship of the items included in this program out side the District to the over-all, comprehensive plan on which we have been working for 20 or 25 years. This was the plan published in the last 2 years, of which this monograph I have here entitled "Open spaces and community services" is the one dealing with the parks. In other words, this request is not just for isolated park acquisitions, but for carrying out a part of a program which has been proceeding over a long period of time, the interruption of which would be a very serious set-back to the whole plan.

These stream valleys are dependent, for their general usefulness, upon being continuously in public ownership, and these areas that are included in this year's program are for the purpose of rescuing necessary links of the stream valley parks from urban development that is already surrounding and encroaching upon them. We have pared this program down to bare bones. It seems to us that we have to fish or cut bait at this time on this park system that we have been working on for a quarter of a century.

The Federal Government, of course, is calling the tune in this area. The activity of the Federal Government has brought about the expansion of the metropolitan area. I was checking up on some figures the other day. The Washington Metropolitan area has moved from

Seventeenth place in 1930, I believe, to ninth or tenth place as of 1950 in the great metropolitan centers of the country.

Senator SALTONSTALL. I can understand from reading this letter here why you feel morally committed for $75,000 on the Virginia side. You have to go to the State and the local government there and urge them to put up $75,000 and now you want to put up your share.

Now, on the Maryland side, on page 3 of your statement here you

say:

Undoubtedly the House committee did not understand that to delay these particular projects on the Maryland side of Washington would actually result in the abandonment of them and not merely the postponement of putting them into effect until after the international crisis has passed.

What do you mean by that?

Mr. NOLEN. Simply that the rate of private development in the areas that are involved in these projects is so rapid that it will engulf the areas that are planned as parks.

FEDERAL-LOCAL CONTRIBUTIONS

Senator SALTONSTALL. So you say $153,000 is needed to buy the land and that is all you are going to try to do, just get the land under Federal control?

Mr. NOLEN. That, sir, is the Federal contribution that we make to Maryland, and they will match that with twice that amount with. their own funds in order to proceed with these projects.

Senator SALTONSTALL. We are putting up one-third and they are putting up two-thirds?

Mr. NOLEN. That is right.

I would like Mr. Lee to explain these in detail and tell you about the commitments that we feel we have toward Virginia and also the commitments we have toward Maryland.

Senator SALTONSTALL. Is that a moral commitment, a written commitment, or a contract, or what kind of commitment? It sounds like a moral commitment.

Mr. LEE. I think that is entirely correct, Senator. The newspapers. of the city of Washington have been hounding the Fairfax County government for a number of years to get interested in this parkway and do its part. This year for the first time Fairfax County has come up with its share. It is making up its budget during this month, and I checked with them this morning on the telephone and they said this item is definitely in their budget.

Likewise, the Virginia State Legislature, which, as you know, appropriates money with extreme caution, did put up its share at its biennial session that ended just a few months ago. We received from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors a copy of a resolution evidently adopted by that board a day or two after the results of the House Appropriations Committee's actions were published in the newspapers. I would like to introduce that into the record.

Senator MAYBANK. If there is no objection it will be made a part. of the record.

(The resolution referred to follows:)

At a regular meeting of the Board of County Supervisors of Fairfax County, Va., held in the board room in the County Office Building at Fairfax, Va., on Wednesday, March 19, 1952, at which meeting all members were present and voting, the following resolution was adopted: