________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
were basic involvements of his. We tried to suggest that the legislation as passed, signed by
the President and everything else, said certain of the normal things were overcome by the
words of the legislation and, "Therefore, Mr. Secretary, you really need to deal with those
issues with the Congress straight up--that is your role as the secretary. If you deal with those
issues straight up at the top, then it'll be clearer to us about how we proceed. If you don't
deal with them at the top and only talk to us about your misgivings--and don't talk with the
man who wrote the legislation--then we are probably going to be having a lot of stress
because the legislation says we should be doing something, and we have a person holding us
and you accountable for it, and so we've got to deal with it. So, who best to deal with that--
us at the bottom or you at the top?"
He chose not to deal with it till later and tried to go by these other means and stretch it out, so
that made for some touchy times in dealing with the Section 202 program.
Q:
How far had that gone by the time you left in 1984? Was the project still ongoing?
A:
Yes.
Q:
Gianelli was still there, I think.
A:
Yes.
Q:
So, was it still that this guerrilla warfare hadn't really been resolved?
A:
Well, it was resolving. It was resolved shortly after I left, as I recall. Secretary Gianelli and
Senator Byrd finally did come to grips with what the legislation meant. The resolution was
that the most liberal interpretation would apply to the five named communities, but not for
the others. That was helpful and that would have been helpful to us early on because we had
to study the whole watershed areas to find other places to determine what we needed to do to
protect these areas. We had community concepts all over to bring protection to this same
kind of high standard. The new agreed-to resolution greatly reduced the number of
communities to be protected.
The problem at Matewan was how to protect a town that had almost been completely
destroyed by flood and almost didn't exist any more. We practically had to rebuild a site for
the town and then protect that site from the flood while the town was rebuilt. Now, that's
pretty important in West Virginia. See, that's one of the social issues involved in determining
what is the federal interest. What's a social interest; how much should people do; what's
right--in that almost everything in West Virginia along the rivers is vertical and
communities exist on narrow floodplains alongside the rivers in the deep valleys?
Q:
In the floodplain?
A:
In the floodplain--that's right. So, what do you do? Even people living up the hollows and
those who were doing the coal mining would come into their community seat for their dime
store, supermarket, and movies, et cetera. For that country seat to exist, you had to protect
something. So, should you have a Matewan or not? So, that's where the gut issue was, and
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