Oral History with Rick Boucher Part 2, October 25, 2023 (Ms2021-048)

Ren Harman: Good afternoon this is Ren Harman the Oral History Projects Archivist in Special Collections and University Archives at Virginia Tech. Today’s date is October 25th 2023 at about 1:55 p.m. We are in the conference room in Special Collections and University Archives with a returned guest. So, again I’ll ask you just to introduce yourself and just say your name will be fine.

Rick Boucher: Yes Rick Boucher, I was a member of the State Senate from 1975 until 1983 and then a member of the US Congress from 1983 until 2011.

Ren: Thank you sir, so what brings us here today is to look at some of your legislative work. Of course we did the previous oral history already, where 00:01:00we looked at your life story and where you grew up, a little bit about your life, how you ran for office in the State Senate and then ran for the House of Representatives. But today we wanted to focus on your legislative achievements. So I want to start with the Virginia Senate which you mentioned, so you represented the 39th district in the State Senate--

Rick: Correct Ren: From January 1975 to December of 1982, with some overlap for swearing in.

Rick: Actually the date is slightly off there. I was elected in a special election.

Ren: Okay.

Rick: And the general election on the same day. The incumbent resigned midway through the year in 1975, and so I received the nomination both for his unexpired term, which was only a couple of months, until the end of 1975, and for the upcoming full term of 4 years beginning in January of 1976. But that special election was in November of 1975. So I served a very short special term, taking office in November 1975 and then joined the Senate for a full term in January of 1976.

Ren: Great, 00:02:00thank you. So looking at your time in the State Senate in Virginia, looking at your legislative achievements and some laws that you sponsored or co-sponsored, can you talk about just some of those, or all of those if you like.

Rick: So yes, there are several I think that stand out in this process [there are extensive files in the Virginia Tech collection containing materials on each of the items of legislation we will be discussing]. The first of these might be the passage of Virginia’s first oil and gas act. I had a number of constituents in the counties where natural gas is found who were complaining about erosion that was coming from the rigs that had been set up in order to harvest natural gas. And at the time, the law was not particularly clear with regard to their status under the state’s conservation laws, and so I began the process by introducing a bill that would place them squarely under regulation of the agency that was the forerunner of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. So that there would be a measure of regulation 00:03:00with regard to how those sites were maintained and how runoff from the site could be prevented. During the process of considering the bill, its scope expanded greatly. Because it wasn’t long until the natural gas industry came to my office and said, well obviously you have an interest in the general subject of our industry, and we have a bigger request. We will certainly help you accommodate your need of environmental protection on our sites. But, we would like for you to consider introducing a larger measure that would regularize the development of natural gas in places where gas is being developed coincident with the presence of coal. Because sometimes we have to drill 00:04:00our wells down through coal seams in order to reach the gas deposits, and if there is subsequent mining of the coal in that seam, we would want to make sure there’s a way that the coal company would know there’s a gas well going down, so we don’t have a disaster. And I thought, well that sounds like a great idea, but it was a larger subject. It involved the coal industry also.

The entirety of the legislation was more than we could accomplish just from a standing start in one legislative session. So I [suggested that a committee be authorized to study the matter for one year and report recommendations to the General Assembly]. I was a member of the Virginia Coal and Energy Commission, and I persuaded the commission to set up a special subcommittee, that during the course of a full year would evaluate the subject and [consider and find ways to accommodate the needs of] the natural gas industry, the environmental community and the coal industry through a series of meetings and conferences 00:05:00and then recommend a bill. I was appointed chairman of that special committee and held a whole series of meetings during the course of one full year, and then in the next legislative session, [I introduced the legislation that was the culmination of the special committee’s work]. The full coal and energy commission endorsed it. I introduced it in the State Senate. Hearings were held, and it passed both the Senate and House and became law. We styled it the Coal and Gas Act, and it became Virginia’s first natural gas act. It’s been modified several times since and expanded to cover additional needs, but that was the foundation of it.

Ren: Let me ask, the 39th district when you were in the State Senate, what counties did that cover?

Rick: Part of Russell County, which is where most of this gas development was taking place, all of Washington County, all of Scott County, all of Smyth County, and the City of Bristol.

Ren: Okay 00:06:00so you were talking about working with the natural gas and coal companies to develop this--

Rick: And citizen groups, it was a broad study that involved all the interested stakeholders.

Ren: Was there any type of, I don’t want to say animosity, but between the coal and natural gas industries? I’m just curious.

Rick: Not animosity. Tension, certainly.

Ren: Tension, yeah.

Rick: Because the gas industry was wanting to make sure that coal wasn’t going to mine close enough to their wells to cause a problem. The coal industry wanted to be able to mine all the coal that it could. So there were interests on both sides that needed to be acknowledged and accommodated in the legislation. But animosity, no. There certainly wasn’t. Not any of that. [Ultimately, we resolved the matter by requiring clear location identification whenever gas wells penetrated coal seams so that subsequent coal extraction could occur safely] Ren: Then the second piece of legislation that I wanted to ask you about is the tax on marriages 00:07:00to provide financial support for spousal abuse centers.

Rick: [Chuckles] well. This was one bill that I introduced that actually managed to get me on the local news with a wedding cake, and the little plastic bride and groom at the top of the wedding cake that is so famous.

Ren: Right.

Rick: And the headline of the news story was: “Senator Rick Boucher wants to Tax Marriages” and of course that attracted a lot of viewers. But it was for a very good cause. And it was a necessary way to create funding for spouse abuse shelters, which did not have a dedicated funding stream of any kind. Sometimes shelters couldn’t even keep their doors open because of lack of funding. And the legislation provided a dedicated state funding stream 00:08:00for them. In the end, the bill passed without a whole lot of opposition, but it was novel in the sense that the first reaction of people who saw the television piece was, what?! What does he really want to do? So that did pass, and some version of that I think is part of Virginia law today.

Ren: That’s great. I want to ask you about marijuana.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Ren: In Virginia, at this time.

Rick: Yep.

Ren: And kind of that piece of legislation.

Rick: Well, I was a member of the Virginia State Crime Commission, and the director of the Virginia State Crime Commission was a very smart fella whose name was Lewis Hurst. He had been a former chief of police in the City of Norfolk, one of Virginia’s largest cities. He had dealt with a lot of urban crime problems, and because he had been chief of police, he had the respect of the law enforcement community around the state. He said to me one day, the state’s drug laws 00:09:00are a mess. He said, you know, the sale of a small amount of marijuana, maybe enough to make ten joints, would be potentially punishable with the same severity as the sale of heroin. Or the sale of cocaine, or something far more lethal, and in large quantities. So the law doesn’t really distinguish marijuana from the more dangerous drugs. It treats all of these drugs the same, and they’re clearly not the same. The result of this disparity in law, not graduating according to the severity of the drug involved, is that law enforcement oftentimes tends to go for the lowest hanging fruit. And sometimes law enforcement offices count the number of convictions they get, not the quality of the convictions. It counts as a conviction on your scale if you arrest and send to jail a person who possesses a small amount of marijuana and you get the same credit 00:10:00on your sheet for that as you would get if you arrested and convicted someone who was selling a lot of heroin. Mr. Hurst said that’s wrong. Law enforcement resources need to be incented to be directed to the more serious offenses. And the way to achieve that is to pass a law that treats marijuana a lot less severely and treats the other offenses as severely as they’re treated today, or maybe even more severely. But he said, I can’t find somebody who’s willing to take it on because it’s too politically delicate. Because a legislator who sponsors such a bill is going to be accused by his opponent in the next election of being soft on drugs, because inevitably we’re going to have to reduce the penalty at the lower end of the scale for people who are just using marijuana, or gifting a small amount to a friend. He said, would you be willing to consider it? I said, well, on a couple of conditions yes, 00:11:00because I see the need.

First of all we need to set up a subcommittee of the Crime Commission in order to study this and recommend appropriate legislation. Secondly I want you to speak to your friend A.L. Philott who was Speaker of the House of Delegates at the time and a very good friend of Lewis Hurst. And he was a very conservative member of the House from Henry County, from the town of Bassett, and was the model of a conservative member of the General Assembly. I said, I want you to convince him to serve on the committee and ultimately to support the legislation. And Lewis said, well that’s a tall order. I said, okay I’m not finished. I said third, I want you to get the endorsement 00:12:00for the legislation when we have a finished product from our study from the law enforcement community in Virginia. Namely the Sheriffs Association level, and the Association of Police Chiefs at the state level. I said, if you can get those things, and tell me that you’re pretty confident you can do it, I’ll agree to chair the subcommittee, and I will introduce the bill and work hard for its passage, once we devise the right approach to doing this legislatively. He said, fine, I think I can do all three. He said, I’ll commit to you my best effort. I said, fine, if you’ll do that, I’ll commit to you my best effort. And so we preceded, and had a full year of hearings all around the state. We had them in Norfolk and Northern Virginia, and Roanoke. I think we had one in the most rural parts of my senatorial district. And out of 00:13:00all of these hearings, people came forward and mostly agreed the state’s drug laws need to be reformed. There was broad agreement on that, even if there was not on the specifics of what the reforms ought to be. But through a process of hearings, listening to people, asking questions, we gradually were able to reduce down the concepts into a couple of legislative steps.

Our bill passed and was signed into law, and one of the first things we did was to say that the medical use of marijuana would no longer be illegal under Virginia law. And with the signing of the bill into law, Virginia became the first state in the nation to permit medical 00:14:00use of marijuana. Virginia was first. Now, it wasn’t the complete answer, because at the federal level, medical use of marijuana remained unlawful. But at least we had cleared the decks at the state level. So under state law, marijuana could be utilized or at least the active ingredient in marijuana, the THC, could be utilized. Even more importantly, we significantly reduced the penalty for mere marijuana use. Marijuana for personal use was still an infraction, but it was no longer a felony. It could be punished by no more than a ten-day jail term, which was as I recall, A.L. Philpott’s demand for supporting the bill. He said, I have to have a little bit of jail time, even for mere marijuana possession. I said, okay if that’s the price of getting the bill passed, we’ll do it. So that was in the bill. 00:15:00But otherwise it was a civil infraction, And then the penalties for various drug offenses were graduated in accordance with what substance was involved and how much was involved in the transaction. So we regularized and made sense out of a drug law that was leading to pure confusion previously. And that was as it turned out, a two year effort, a two year study by the State Crime Commission, leading to the passage of the law.

Ren: I’m going to be asking this question a lot as we move through the conversation and talk about these various legislative achievements both at the state level and federal level. You mentioned the hesitancy that you had to be part of this law possibly legalizing the medical use of marijuana. I imagine this had to be in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Rick: It was actually about 1978.

Ren: So 1978, I think that might be difficult 00:16:00to do today, and you were saying, hey maybe don’t do this, because your opponent would say that you’re soft on crime or soft on drugs. What was the reaction to your constituents, I know you went around and toured different places, but specifically in your district. How was it received?

Rick: I had the politician’s natural reservation about embarking on a highly controversial subject. You will find some people in elected office who take no part in policy at all. All they really do is go around, shake hands, and attend events, but never introduce a bill. Never comment on a bill. They’re absolutely silent when it comes to matters of policy. I was exactly 00:17:00the opposite. I wanted to be involved in policy, that’s why I ran for office. That was my interest in being there, and I looked for opportunities to be involved. And so knowing that about me, Lewis Hurst targeted me as a liely person to take this on. But I had the natural politician’s reservation about this, and that’s why I asked questions. I said well, I’ll do this but on these three conditions. And these were conditions that I was pretty sure were within his ability to deliver. I didn’t ask anything that would end the conversation or put it off the table. Said, do these three things and I’ll do my best. And these were things he could do, and he was able to do all three. So that’s how we were able to get the bill passed. Part of it was my reservation of being immersed in an issue that was going to be politically unpopular. Part of it was knowing that you couldn’t pass the bill unless you had these ingredients in place. It was a strategic request. It wasn’t just, oh do this for me and I’ll do this for you. It wasn’t that at all. It was: here 00:18:00are three things that can, yes, help protect me politically, but more importantly, make sure the bill passes. Because without these things we really can’t pass it. Other people in the Senate and House of Delegates will react negatively unless we have this insurance. That’s why it was done. How did people in my district react? Well I had the advantage there of having some credibility. If I came forward with an idea, people knew me well enough to know that they should listen. Once they listened and they heard that this was something that perhaps the single most conservative member of the House of Delegates supported, something that the police chiefs, and the Sheriffs Association around the state supported, and that law enforcement resources were being misdirected to something that was not the proper purpose, because the law was skewed in a fashion that needed to be corrected. Once they heard those things, people in my district said, okay, we think you’re doing the right thing. And it never 00:19:00turned out to be an election issue after the bill passed. It was not an election issue.

Ren: So the challenger in the next cycle didn’t use it in any type of way?

Rick: No, it was never used.

Ren: Okay, moving on I want to talk about uranium mining. Because I was reading this, and I did not know this.

Rick: Still a very alive subject.

Ren: Yeah, so do you want to speak to that?

Rick: Yes. The Marline [Oil] Corporation is a Canadian company that had discovered that a farm [Coles Hill] near the town Chatham in Pittsylvania County in Southside Virginia, had an extraordinarily large deposit of uranium. And they wanted to be able to mine that deposit of uranium. The world still needs uranium for nuclear 00:20:00power plants, and this company saw a great opportunity. There was no Virginia law specific to uranium mining at the time. They thought the coast was clear. But, a number of Virginia environmental organizations led by the Piedmont Environmental Council came to the General Assembly, visited my office, and said this is a big problem, because uranium mining produces tailings which is the amount of dirt that get removed from the mine and put into a big pile in order to uncover the uranium. And that big pile of dirt called tailings contains a lot of heavy metals, and they said in Virginia 00:21:00that is a big problem because we are a wet climate. We have a lot of rainfall, and the rainfall is going to intrude down through the pile of tailings, and the heavy metals are going to get into the groundwater. So it’s a very hazardous state in which to conduct uranium mining. They said that’s generally true throughout the southeast, and it’s very true in Virginia. And that is unlike the western states. Arizona, New Mexico, et cetera where uranium is mined, and done so with relative safety. Because those are drier environments. You don’t have nearly as much rainfall. So tailings are more protected.

This was sort of the story in a nutshell and we set up a committee, again, of the Coal and Energy Commission, and I was on that committee. We visited the western states, Texas, 00:22:00New Mexico, specifically as I recall. And we looked at uranium mines there and listened to what the people there had to say. When we asked them all questions about rainfall and we looked at their annual precipitation numbers, they were well lower than what we have in Virginia. So the case was basically made that this was not an activity that would be appropriate for our state. The culmination of that work was the passage of a moratorium on the mining of uranium in Virginia. Our committee supported that; it passed, and that moratorium remains in place today. It’s still in the law notwithstanding the occasional repeated effort, even as recently as the past couple of years, to have the moratorium lifted so that uranium can be mined. But the situation really hasn’t changed. We may have a little less rainfall because of climate change, but we still 00:23:00are a far wetter place than other states where uranium mining is more appropriate.

Ren: Before we move onto your term as a member of the House of Representatives, I wanted to ask you two questions. The first question is: is there any piece of legislation that we haven’t talked about that you would like to talk about?

Rick: Yes, another initiative I undertook as a member of the State Crime Commission was the revision of the state’s criminal sexual assault laws. And this in the end was as large an effort requiring as long a study time about two years in total, as was the effort to reform the state’s drug laws. I was, in the end, the lead sponsor of the bill that passed that reformed 00:24:00the state’s criminal sexual assault laws. It was a major problem, because victims of sexual assault were treated terribly in the court process. If a woman said, I’ve been raped, or I’ve been sexually abused, the typical criminal defense was, well you asked for it. You were flirtatious or you brought this on yourself, and very damaging to women was the introduction testimony regarding the general reputation of the woman in the community. You could always find somebody who’s going to go testify to a bad reputation, that’s not that hard to do. Just go find somebody who’s willing to do it. This was a favorite tactic of many criminal defense attorneys. So women were treated terribly 00:25:00in the court process, and it was testimony about general reputation as evidence that was so harmful. So as a result, women were reluctant to report criminal sexual assaults. [That evidence really had nothing to do with whether an assault had occurred, but it prevented many cases from being reported and many abusers from being brought to justice]. The bill that we introduced had multiple facets. [It passed both house and was signed into law]. I think the main thing it did was disallow the use of general reputation evidence. And that was a big change. And the numbers have been pretty convincing since the passage of that law, with far more assaults being reported and prosecuted. Not because the number of assaults has increased; there’s no evidence of that. It’s because the number of reports has increased. It’s not offenses increasing, it’s reports increasing. And that’s because with general reputation evidence disallowed women are far more willing to come forward and talk about their experience and engage with the court process.

Ren: That’s great, I’ll ask you the same question once we talk about your work at the federal level, but were there any pieces of legislation or bills that you were a part of that didn’t make it over 00:26:00the finish line that you wish would’ve got voted on or brought to committee, or whatever the process. Were there any that you were involved in, that you wish if you could get in a time machine, you could go back and revisit some of those?

Rick: The human mind has a marvelous capacity to forget the unpleasant [laughter]. I mean, I decided long ago that I was going to be disappointed a lot, but I was also going to achieve a lot along the way. And I’ve kind of let the disappointments go by the wayside. I never really totally gave up on things. I would come back a couple of years later and look at a situation again and say, is it now possible to do this? Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t. I would have to say the major things that I undertook from a policy standpoint in the seven years I spent in the Virginia State Senate which I am the proudest of having gotten passed are the things I just mentioned.

Ren: Great, great. Moving on, you were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and you served--can you give us the dates so I don’t mess those up?

Rick: Yes, 00:27:00I was elected in November of 1982 to the U.S. House from the 9th District of Virginia, and I served for twenty-eight years and left the House in January of 2011. And that, by the way, is the longest tenure of any member of Congress in the history of the 9th District. The Library of Congress looked at this question and sent a little memo over, detailing the lengths that every member served since the district had been created well more than two centuries ago, and the longest tenure was my twenty-eight years, by ten years. The next longest was eighteen and two members had served for eighteen years.

Ren: I wonder, it’s kind of a sidebar here, what’s the average length of someone’s congressional 00:28:00tenure now? Not just in Virginia, but nationwide?

Rick: These days, less than ten years, Ren: Yeah I would assume, because of a lot of reasons.

Rick: A lot of reasons.

Ren: Let’s get into some of the federal legislation that you sponsored or co-sponsored.

Rick: Well these are all bills of which I was the primary sponsor.

Ren: Oh alright.

Rick: So chief sponsor. As I just mentioned I was elected in December of 1982, and the first congressional visitor that I had--and this was before I became a member of Congress but I had been elected--was about three days after the election. And the visitor was a wonderful older gentleman named Ernie Dickerman. As I recall he was from Nelson County, not from my congressional district. But he came to Abingdon and met with me in my office, and he said, I’m here to ask you to introduce your first bill in the House. And I said, oh? 00:29:00What might that be? And he said, I want you to introduce a wilderness bill. Well he was “Mr. Wilderness” [and longtime leader of the group of citizens who promoted the designation of wilderness areas in Virginia’s national forests]. At the time that he came to see me, he was in his eighties, but fit and trim and in fabulous shape. You could tell that he loved the outdoors and spent a lot of time in it. He regaled me with the wonders of Virginia’s forests in public ownership, national forest lands, and he said, “I have a list.” These are the areas that need to be protected and here are the acreages for each one and here’s a map showing where they are. He said, [as President of the Virginia Wilderness Committee,] I want you to introduce this bill. I said, okay. I had never heard of it, but turned out 00:30:00it was a pretty large and well financed organization, financed by its members. And they were determined to pass a wilderness bill. So they worked very hard for the bill’s passage. I introduced the bill. Jim Olin from the 6th District had been elected the same day that I was. His district was Roanoke and the Shenandoah Valley, and some of the proposed wilderness areas were in his district, so I needed his support. He was very willing to help. He became a co-sponsor of the bill. Together we were able to get it passed, so it was the first bill that I introduced, the first of the bills that I introduced that became law, and it was in my first term, and it was something that I was very proud of and still am to this day. Those 00:31:00wilderness areas have enhanced Virginia’s tourism; they have preserved very valuable lands. One of them is just north of Blacksburg. [In order to demonstrate the necessary level of public support for the bill, my staff visited with the county board of supervisors in each county where a proposed wilderness area was located and asked for a formal resolution of support for bill passage. We made the case that having wilderness areas would be good for developing local tourism because the wilderness designation would be noted in guidebooks and travel publications and would attract visitors who enjoy the outdoors and would like to explore the wilderness areas. All of the local governing bodies wanted to know whether hunting would be barred in federal wilderness areas. We assured them that hunting would be allowed, and that the designation would be a help in attracting tourism to the county. Each board passed the resolution we requested, quelling any public concerns that the lands might be locked away in an economically harmful way or to the disadvantage of hunters.] Ren: I should’ve asked you this maybe at the beginning when we were talking about your time in the House, and I know it varies probably by the bill and what the ultimate goals are. But can you give us a basic rundown, not of how a bill becomes a law, but how does a bill like this, you know, does it go to a floor? Is it voted in committee? I guess it depends, right?

Rick: Well a lot is involved in getting a bill passed. It’s harder to do in the U.S. Congress than it is in the state legislature. The timeframes are longer; what is required to pass a bill in terms of a demonstration of public support for the measure is far greater. The politics are obviously much more complex. But the basic process 00:32:00is the same; you learn this in Government 101. It’s: introduce the bill in one house, a committee hears it, a committee approves it, it goes to the floor of that house, it passes, it goes to the other house where the process is repeated. It’s your bill, as originated in your house, but your bill goes to a committee in the other house, that committee has hearings and processes the bill, approves it, it goes to the floor of that house, it passes. If that house has amended the bill in any way, [and the originating house disagrees with the change,] you have a committee of conference that resolves the differences between what one house has done and another house has done. So in the end you have a uniform text that both houses then need to pass. And then the bill goes to the executive, the governor or the president if it’s a federal bill to be signed. But there’s a lot more involved. You have to build citizen support for bills that address major issues. If it’s a small thing, like you’re doing an obvious amendment 00:33:00to a code section to correct an error, that’s no problem; that can be done easily. But if it’s something major that has an impact on society, then you have to have public support for doing it. You have to rally that support, which means you have to build external coalitions to support the bill. Legislators call the interested people “stakeholders”. They can be public interest groups, like environmental groups, labor unions, or companies. Stakeholders can be an entire industry collected under an industry association. So you have all of those interests, sometimes colliding, in order to determine what the appropriate policy is. It’s optimal to harmonize those groups and come to the legislature united and say, we need this change made. [The broader the coalition of supporters for a bill is, the better the chances the bill will pass.] Ren: The 00:34:00next thing I want to talk about, and we mentioned this off the record when we were speaking earlier, but your work with telecommunications and I know you have a long and extensive history with that field. So can you talk about how you got involved and some of those pieces of legislation?

Rick: Yes, very interesting, It goes back to my congressional district. I used to have a lot of public town meetings, I had more than the typical member of Congress. Part of that was because I represented such a big, sprawling district. We had twenty-seven counties and four independent cities in the congressional district. The population when I was first elected to the district was about 650,000. Over the years district populations have grown as the U.S. population grew. When I left Congress, my district included more counties and a population of about 770,000. It was a big 00:35:00sprawling area across two mountain ranges, dramatically different economies, and the far western part of the district was coal producing. Here in the New River Valley, the dominant economy is higher education. So very different areas that I represented. And people there have very different views, and I would travel the district constantly. I was young, I had energy, and I was always on the road. Virtually every Saturday, I would hold three public town meetings in three different counties in the district and I would try to get to every county and city with a public town meeting at least twice a year, preferably three times a year in each county. So it was a lot of traveling. And I did that both to report on what I was doing, so people would feel like they were in touch with what their representative was working to accomplish for them, and also to learn. More importantly to learn because people would come to the town meetings and say, I have a problem with this, that, or the other, and 00:36:00I’m not the only one, my neighbor does too. Sometimes the neighbor would stand up and say, yeah that’s right it’s a big problem and we want you to do something about it. [So to answer your question about my first involvement with telecommunications law and policy] I had a lot of neighbors coming to me in town meetings saying, you know, we live in valleys and there are mountains all around us and we can’t get any television signals [from the local stations. We have no access to local news, and can’t watch the national networks, which at the time were NBC. CBS, and ABC. Some people had the very large C-band backyard satellite dishes and received a range of mostly exotic programs, many of which were foreign, but couldn’t receive the US based network signals]. One very clever person who was very knowledgeable and who had the problem said to me, you know there is a solution, it’s not easy but you’re the one we’d like to see do it. And that is, pass a law that gives us the permission for the backyard satellite dish to be able to get network signals delivered to that dish, so 00:37:00that we can watch Walter Cronkite deliver the evening news. Or see the professional baseball game or our favorite TV show. We want to be able to do that. Just watch the network. I thought, okay that certainly makes sense, because a lot of people are affected by this and I was hearing it in county after county.

So I went back to Washington, talked to some of my colleagues who were having the same kinds of issues and I thought, okay how can we go about this? I knew that the major interested external party, a primary stakeholder shall we say, was going to be the broadcasters [who would be opposed if a change in the law was so broad that people began receiving distant network signals instead of watching the local network affiliates]. In order to discuss what an appropriate solution would be and figure out how we can structure something the broadcasters didn’t vehemently object to [and likely kill in the legislative process], I called the National Association of Broadcasters. This is an example of how a 00:38:00member of Congress can interact with the private sector in a way that benefits his constituents. Some people think that if you’re talking to companies, there’s something shady about that, but there’s not because you depend on learning about the actual real-world experience of companies in order to help you formulate rational policies, something that actually works in practice and can be enacted into law. And hopefully, you turn those private entities into supporters of whatever measure you’re trying to introduce, which turned out to be the case here. I said to broadcasters, here’s the problem, you don’t have these rural viewers because they can’t get the signals from your local TV stations. How can we at least let them get network signals so they can see network programming? They said, okay there is a way, but we’re going 00:39:00to have to be very careful in terms of what we support because we don’t want people to just get distant network signals and not watch our local stations. I said, understood, so we have to walk a fine line here. How do we do that? They said, what we would suggest is that we define something called a white area, and a white area is a place where the person cannot get a signal from the local TV stations using a conventional aerial. And I said okay, how are we going to measure that in a way that satisfies you? We can’t just say white area in the law, we have to specify what it is. So we came up with a formula. I think it’s still in the law today. It says that if the household cant get a local television signal using a 00:40:00conventional rooftop mounted antennae [that household is unserved and could receive distant network signals]. It really is site specific to each house. If they put a regular antenna on the roof could you get the signal? That’s the test. Broadcasters were comfortable enough with it that they didn’t fight the bill and in the end testified for the bill. They said, we know this is a problem, we want to be helpful, and so we’re going to support Congressman Boucher’s bill. Long story short, the measure I put together passed, but it didn’t 00:41:00pass with my name on it. It was my bill, my introduction, [and my negotiation with broadcasters that led to the text of the bill that passed] but as often happens in the congressional process, once my bill was approved in committee, it was added as an amendment as a part of a larger bill which covered a broader range of subjects that somebody else had introduced which was signed into law. So fine, it got the job done.

Ren: So you weren’t, for lack of a better word, precious about--

Rick: No.

Ren: You were just like, hey as long as it gets passed.

Rick: I wanted to get the job done.

Ren: Right.

Rick: I wanted to get the bill passed. Getting credit for it, being able to sit here with you today and say, oh my name is on the bill the President signed… that’s not that important.

Ren: That’s good.

Rick: Getting the law passed was, and so I did do that. But that was the start. I went on from there to develop a career-long interest in matters of telecommunications and technology policy. [Telecommunications policy was a part of the jurisdiction of one of my committees, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, so I was in a good position to carve out that niche in federal policy for special focus. Over the next twenty-five years I was deeply involved in debating and fashioning every major item of telecommunications legislation that became law including the more recent topics of network neutrality, which has yet to become law, and the incentive auction of the analogue TV broadcast spectrum in order to expand opportunities for mobile broadband, which has taken place.] In the early days though, telecommunications meant radio and television signals and telephone service, and that’s really all there was. It was phone service, radios, and television. Telegraphs were a thing of the past, even though a large 00:42:00national company still has the word telegraph in its name: AT&T, American Telephone and Telegraph. In those early days, it was only telephone service and broadcast media. You know, the telephone industry [and the broadcast industries had a range of federal policy] issues, and the cable industry was just being born so that television signals could be collected at a central point and delivered to homes without the need to put antennas up on the roofs. You could subscribe to the local cable company that collected the TV signals and then delivered them into the home. As a matter of fact, the first name for it was community antenna television, CATV, Community Antenna Television. And it consisted of an array of antennas on the outside of town collecting local TV signals, packaging those, and then sending them across cables to individual homes in the community. Of course that industry grew and before 00:43:00long it was producing its own programming and had become [the large entity we think of as cable TV today], like Comcast, the large cable company, but that’s not the way it started. These were all, tiny, community level affairs. But they were growing, so they became a participant in the wider conversion about telecommunications policy and eventually as you might imagine the telephone and cable industries started colliding. [Both industries were barred from competing with the other. Telephone companies could not by law offer cable TV service, and cable companies were barred from offering telephone service because the states had granted monopolies to local telephone companies in exchange for submitting to rate and terms of service regulation. And in tension between cable and telephone, the public interest requirements gradually became clear]. The telephone industry was regulated; the cable industry was not. So the cable industry, unregulated, wanted to offer local telephone service against the regulated telephone company monopoly. Well, the competition would’ve been welcome 00:44:00[but more had to be achieved legislatively if the broader public need for competition was to be met]. The forces were building for a significant pro-competitive reform of the law, and I was one of the people saying, the time has come when we ought to try to inject competition broadly across the board. 00:45:00The elements were there for a balanced legislative arrangement that would create competition in communication markets that were monopolies, and what a wonderful thing, because then you could depend on the market to impose discipline and to set price and you would only need regulation if there was a market failure. So, on that premise, we were able to pass a major measure, which became the largest reform of telecom laws since the original Communications 00:46:00Act was passed in 1934.

Ren: Oh wow.

Rick: This was 1996, so a lot of years had passed since there had been a major reform of the 1934 Act, and this was it, and it did basically what I just described. [The Communications Act of 1996] allowed telephone companies to offer cable TV service, in competition with cable companies that were previously a monopoly. It allowed cable companies to offer a robust and full local television service and required the local telephone companies to let the cable companies interconnect so they could offer their own phone service to their customers but interconnect with the national network. We added a few other elements. The breakup of AT&T had previously been ordered in a consent decree in the U.S. District 00:47:00Court in the District of Columbia that had created the Regional Bell Operating Companies that offered local telephone service exclusively. AT&T previously owned it all. They had long distance and most of the local telephone service across the U.S., except for a few little local companies. The consent decree said, we’re going to break you up, and we’re going to let you keep AT&T long distance, but we’re going to create seven Regional Bell Operating Companies that are going to own your local telephone service. Each one will have an area, so there was something called Bell Atlantic, as a part of it, which today we call Verizon. There was PacTel, otherwise known as Pacific Telesis, that was California and the West Coast, I think Oregon and Washington were part of it. US West was created for the Central Western states. Arizona, Utah, 00:48:00New Mexico, Colorado. And then there was BellSouth, that was the Southeast. Southwestern Bell was Texas, Oklahoma. There was New York England Bell, which was New York and the New England states. Then Bell Atlantic was Pennsylvania south all the way down to, and including Virginia, and Bell South was south of us. They could offer local phone service, but they were prohibited from offering long distance; only AT&T could do that. So again, we had artificial restrictions in federal law based on who could offer what, so we decided in the 1996 Act that the time had come to let competition come into the long distance market. Why should that remain a monopoly? So we basically 00:49:00said, okay we’re going to let the Bell Regional Operating Companies offer long distance service, but only after they had demonstrated they had sufficiently opened their local exchanges to local telephone competition. [They had to prove that they had opened their networks for interconnecting by cable and other companies wanting to offer a competing local telephone service.] They had to prove they had done that to the satisfaction of the regulator, and once they had done that, they were allowed to enter the long distance market. So we brought competition to a whole range of technology and communications markets that had been monopolies in the past. And it was a sweeping reform, it made a huge amount of difference. Looked at years later, and viewed through that lens, 00:50:00it was a big success. These markets have grown. Prices had moderated to the benefit of the consumers, so the law was quite successful. And I was quite involved in that. I was one of the ones urging that we should allow this competition to take place [and a participant in every aspect of the drafting of the bill’s provisions].

Ren: I want to ask you next about being a proponent of intellectual property.

Rick: Um yes. So, I was on the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on intellectual property. I served on the subcommittee for twenty-eight years and was very involved in copyright and patents legislation. In the field of copyrights, I had graduated toward the users’ side of the equation, by that I mean not 00:51:00the right of the copyright holder per say, but the right of the user of intellectual property to utilize [a copyrighted work when the copyright was held by someone else]. An example of that might be, if you wanted to copy a page from a book because you wanted to use that page for future reference, or in a speech. Under just the pure version of copyright as a notion, that copy would be unlawful [but under the principle of “Fair Use” copies for limited personal non-commercial use could be allowed. One example in the electronic area of a need for fair use is: if you just want to back something up on a backup drive, software for example, or a song that you have paid for, you paid to download from a streaming service. You’ve satisfied the copyright to the extent that you brought the item as required. But then if you just want to back it up so that if your hard disk crashes you don’t have to buy it again, can you do that? 00:52:00Well, the recording industry initially said no, you can’t do that because you’re making a copy of our copyrighted work, even though you’re doing it for personal use and for no commercial purpose. You are doing this just so you don’t have to buy it from them again if your hard disk crashes. That’s a classic fair use]. But, because you’re not going to use it for commercial purposes, you’re going to use it for your own personal use, then you ought to be able to do that. That’s called a user right, and there are a lot of other examples, but these are very clear ones. User rights were codified by Congress a number of years ago into something called the Fair 00:53:00Use Act, and fair use means that as a user, you can utilize a copyrighted work for limited personal noncommercial purposes, and the statute spells that right out very clearly. But it has always been under assault by the large industries that hold large numbers of copyrighted works. The motion picture and the recording industry constantly assault fair use. [There was always a major fight to keep the fair use principle alive and fend off the efforts of copyright holders to weaken the law. Their goal had been to have pay per use rather than fair use,] and so I spent my years on the intellectual property subcommittee objecting to the tightening after tightening after tightening of the copyright laws that would extinguish user rights. That would clamp down on the ability to use intellectual property in a noncommercial way for one’s own use. And I became infamous in the intellectual property owning community and a hero among people who use intellectual property, including for example: libraries, and I was declared Legislator of the Year by the National Library Association one year, 2006, because 00:54:00of this.

Ren: That’s awesome, I want to ask you about this because when I was reading this I was curious because you were in Congress of the time of Napster, when song copyrighting. What was that right?

Rick: Well Napster was a clear violation of law. It was just pure pirating without a doubt. It was purely for commercial use. No compensation was paid to the copyright owner; it was just theft of intellectual property. There was no defense to what Napster was doing, but Napster was the dark introduction into a history that became much brighter as time went on. As time went on, practices legitimized, and what started out as the illegitimate Napster, became 00:55:00the very legitimate streaming services that we have today. The services allow you to stream music. If you pay for the privilege you can stream or download music. It’s fully licensed, it’s fully sanctioned. The record labels have their own streaming services that allow this today. But in the early days, when the recording industry would come in and just rail about the abuses of Napster, I would agree with them. I would say, yes, from my position on the dias as part of the intellectual property subcommittee, I would say, yes, I’m so glad to hear you come here for a conversation about this because you’re right, this is pure piracy and it shouldn’t be happening. And they would nod, and nod, and nod, and I would say, but you can’t stop the conversation there because if you want to fight this, don’t just come to us. Go back to your corporate suites and say, we 00:56:00need to set up our own streaming service, we need to compete with these people with a lawful product. And if you had that, most people would want to comply with the law and buy the lawful products. Yeah we’ll do what we can to try to help here on the legal side, but frankly it’s already illegal, so I don’t know how many more laws we can pass that will make a difference. If you want to make a difference, you have to start your own streaming service. You have got to start yourself selling a lawful product in competition with Napster. And that, of course, is what happened.

Ren: Even outside of streaming before that, it’s fascinating to me that Apple, I think Apple was the first company to offer where you didn’t have to buy the entire album. You could just buy song-by-song, that was the argument of the people who had Napster, like hey we don’t want the whole album, we just want song-by-song.

Rick: Well 00:57:00that was part of the recording industry’s thing. They wanted to sell the whole album, they didn’t want to sell the individual track or let you stream the individual track because they would make less money on the individual track than they would make selling the whole album. Their resistance to setting up their own streaming service with downloads for an extra payment was just that. They weren’t making as much money as they would make if they sold the whole album. There was this huge resistance to doing it, but their music was being pirated all the while they were resisting setting up the lawful product.

Ren: I want to move on from the copyright, because I do want to be mindful of our time together. When you traveled to Vietnam, could you talk about that and why you were there?

Rick: I had a couple of very good friends who were Buddhists and they had attended lectures by a Buddhist scholar named 00:58:00Thích Nhất Hạnh. He was, probably next to the Dalai Lama, the most popular and well-known Buddhist teacher internationally. And they asked for my help, some of them were constituents, some of them were just people I knew who were friends. They said, we need your help with something, but it’s a big project. It’s going to take a lot of time and you may not want to be involved in it. I said, well describe it. They said, Thích Nhất Hạnh is a Vietnamese monk, he grew up in Vietnam during the time of the Vietnamese war. He was very opposed to the war and being in Vietnam and vocally opposed to the war was not a popular 00:59:00position with the Vietnamese government at that point in time. But he was well enough known and had a big enough audience of people who were reading his works and attending his lectures, that he could draw attention. He went to the Paris Peace Talks during the Vietnam War and was very outspoken at the peace talks in support of ending the war. A lot of what he said did not please the Vietnamese government; they were very unhappy with that. So they exiled him, long story short. He could not go back to Vietnam after the Paris Peace Talks; he was not allowed back into the country. He set up something called Plum Village in the Bordeaux Region of Southern France, and that became the center of his teaching. 01:00:00He would travel from there, and he would have retreats there. A lot of people would go there to listen to his lectures. While he was globally recognized and much in demand, he really wanted to go back to Vietnam. That was his home country and he missed it very much, and he wanted to go home.

So the effort was underway to try to figure out how to get him back into the country. But nobody was talking to the Vietnamese government. So people came to me and said, you would have access. You could get meetings. Would you be willing to try? And I thought, well, it’s a good cause. He should be allowed back in. It would be in the interest of the Vietnamese to let him back in. It would show their openness and their courage really, to allow someone 01:01:00like that to come back and teach there. But I had a lot of questions. The main one I had was, would the U.S. government support this effort? Fortunately, a very good friend of mine, a former colleague [named Pete Peterson], had been nominated [by Bill Clinton] as the first ambassador from the U.S. to Vietnam since we re-established relations with Vietnam. I called him and said, here’s the situation, and I’m wondering what you think about this. He was very receptive and said, I think he should be allowed to come back and our embassy would absolutely support it. And if you want to come over and have some government meetings, I’ll help you set them up. I said, okay, that’s what I needed to know. I want to talk to Thích Nhất Hạnh before I do that 01:02:00and try to get a sense of why he wants to go back so I can talk about this knowledgeably. I went to Plum Village in France and spent a day or two there. Interesting place, it’s like a Vietnamese village in France, really interesting. I could see that he wasn’t political at all. Politics was not on his mind. He wasn’t trying to change the government; he simply wanted to be able to go back home and teach there which he had done in the city of Huế at a temple called Từ Hiếu Temple. He had been a teacher there for most of his life up until the Vietnam war, and he wanted to go back there and in fact he did eventually get to go back. He died in Huế about two years ago, and there was a lot of international news coverage at the time that it happened. I made two trips to Vietnam, and it seemed like we were banging our heads against the wall. We met with the proper people in the government. I 01:03:00don’t think we could’ve done anything more on those trips than we did, and I think we at least got the idea planted in the minds of the Vietnamese government that A: Thích Nhất Hạnh was non-political and just wanted to teach and B: the U.S. government strongly supported this effort, and it would be a good thing to do, in terms of relations between Vietnam and the U.S.. After the second trip we came back and reported to Thích Nhất Hạnh that still, the Vietnamese government is not saying yes, and I said, I don’t think I can do more with more trips. Hopefully we planted the seeds in their minds and things may take time to mature. Let’s wait a year or two to see. It took about four years, but about four years later he was allowed to go back for one trip. And then for more, and then eventually he was allowed to go back there and live. 01:04:00Interesting chapter.

Ren: Yeah for sure.

Rick: And, I guess every member of Congress should say it helped my constituents. I started the description by saying constituents came to me, so yes some of my constituents were very interested and very happy we did that.

Ren: Mm-hmm, I was reading that and I was just fascinated because I never had heard that story.

Rick: Well, I didn’t talk much about it locally. There was no point in talking about it locally; it wasn’t something that was of significant local interest or newsworthy. [But it was something I could do that was beneficial] Ren: Right, right. The last thing that I want to talk to you about, at least in terms of legislation, is something that for sure impacted the district that you represented, and that’s the Clean Air Amendments of 1991.

Rick: I was very involved in environmental policy. As a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, I 01:05:00served on the Energy Subcommittee which also had the federal clean air jurisdiction so we had all of energy policy and the air emissions part of the EPA’s portfolio, and we wrote the laws for that and we oversaw implementation by EPA of the Clean Air Act. So [after a long process of developing the legislation] in 1991, we passed a law that dealt with sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants and those emissions were creating something called acid rain. You may have heard the phrase, it was a commonly discussed problem occuring in the mountains in the late 1980s, early 1990s, because acid rain was affecting trees, and trees were dying. It was a major concern. And 01:06:00sulfur dioxide emissions from coal that was burned in power plants were not regulated. It was clearly time that we had regulations. I was part of the effort to do that. I agreed to support the legislation when I was able to obtain a concession from the chairman of the committee, John Dingell, that the legislation as it went forward would allow the use of fuel switching by utilities as a way to meet the obligations of the law, rather than to require that they install scrubbers and other kinds of technology to scrub out the sulfur dioxide as it was coming out the smokestack. If you can use low sulfur coal, as opposed to higher sulfur coal, then 01:07:00you can meet the requirements of the law that we wound up passing in 1991. Now, my congressional district had a lot of low sulfur coal. This was an opportunity to benefit my constituents, and at the same time help solve a national problem.

Ren: The stars aligned almost, when I was reading this.

Rick: The stars definitely aligned for that. But, it wasn’t easy because there was a contingent representing the high sulfur coal mining region which is Ohio and northern West Virginia. Powerful interests that wanted scrubbers to have to be installed because then you could use the cheaper high sulfur coal instead of our more pricey, low sulfur coal. And it was a big fight between people who wanted scrubbers and the people who wanted fuel switching. My 01:08:00contribution was: the chairman said to me, okay, I need your support for this, if this is the right approach, that’s what we’re going to do. The bill wound up allowing fuel switching, not requiring scrubbers. That was a major victory. The coal industry here saw it as a major victory.

Ren: I remember this, because my father was a coal miner--

Rick: Oh yeah!

Ren: And I remember seeing reports and I remember him being excited if the coal sample came back and it was low sulfur, so when I read this I was like, this is so funny [chuckling].

Rick: You recognized it.

Ren: I recognized, yeah.

Rick: Well the bill was important in another way, and that relates to something I did much later because the bill set up a cap-and-trade program. It was the first cap-and-trade program to be used anywhere, to our knowledge. It hadn’t been used in Europe or anywhere else. It was an American invention. Actually invented by 01:09:00the general counsel to the first president Bush, George H.W. Bush, who was president when we did all this. It’s a marvelous intellectual exercise when you think through this, because what it does is set a cap on emissions. It gives each power plant the emission allowances that are equal to emissions for that year, and then they must [surrender the same number of allowances back to the regulator at the end of the year.] They have to give them back to the government at the end of the year, and they have to have allowances that are equal to their total emissions. That’s for year one when the program starts. But then every year thereafter, there’s a ratchet down in the level of allowed emissions [meaning that each emitter receives fewer allowances each year going forward]. That’s how you reduce emissions overall. 01:10:00Then the next year the power plant is awarded the same number of emission allowances as the previous year, less shall we say 10 percent, and the next year will be less 20 percent. And so over time, the utilities have to reduce emissions, they had to figure out ways to do it. Now, they could do it by fuel switching; they could do it by installing technology if that’s what they chose to do, or and this was the magic of cap-and-trade, they could do it by going into the market and buying allowances that someone else didn’t need and had sold into the market when they had overcontrolled. Now if utility B wants to install technology for example [it may be able to overcontrol and reduce emission by more than the law requires. That utility would then have more emission allowances that it must surrender back to the government at the end of the year. It can sell those excess allowances in the market]. 01:11:00Then utility A, that may not want to reduce its emissions at all for various reasons, can buy those allowances, report those back to the government, and be in compliance with the law. Here’s what it does: by creating a liquid market for allowances the law tends to drive investment to the place where the dollars expended achieve the greatest level of emission reductions. That’s the way the program works. You are, through the law, instilling efficiency. You are recognizing efficiency, you are rewarding it, and efficiency always follows when you have that kind of reward incentive. It worked wonderfully, and as the years progressed after the law was passed, it exceeded the initial projections in terms of the level of emissions reductions obtained by the magic of this process I have 01:12:00just described. Roll forward a couple of decades and we’re trying to address the problem of climate change, and the European Union, having borrowed from our experience, adopted our cap-and-trade mechanism, the thing we invented for sulfur dioxide emissions, and applied that as its mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to comply with its Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gas reduction obligations. They had had about two years of experience with cap and trade in that context when the subcommittee I chaired at the time, the Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee, set out to draft a way of addressing greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.. Our first look was at cap-and-trade, because after all, we had invented it. It was first enacted into law through the very committee that I served on, the Energy and Commerce 01:13:00Committee, and so it was our product. We had the success of our cap-and-trade program for sulfur dioxide emissions as proof that it works. We decided that we wanted to utilize cap-and-trade as our control mechanism for greenhouse gas emissions, same mechanism exactly as for sulfur dioxide, just a different pollutant. But we thought [there would be things to learn from the experience of the European Union in implementing cap and trade for greenhouse gas emissions]. So I took my subcommittee over; we spent a week; we went to various countries in the EU to learn about their experience having implemented our idea of cap-and-trade to control greenhouse gas emissions. Basic question was how’d it go for them? What did you do right? What did you do wrong? If you could do it over again, how would you do it differently? We learned some things about how it could be done differently, and we corrected what I think were their mistakes as their experience 01:14:00showed, in our legislation. My subcommittee drafted [the bill and circulated it widely for stakeholder comment which was largely positive]. I did not chair the subcommittee in the next Congress when it actually got introduced. But it did pass the House as The Clean Energy Security Act, I supported it [and worked successfully to obtain endorsements for the bill from the major coal fired utilities, including Dominion, AEP, and Duke Energy. The key to their support was the schedule of reductions over time and the allowed emission levels which I had a major hand in formulating. In fact, they became the major corporate supporters of the bill as it passed in the House in 2009]. It did not pass the Senate, and we still have not had a legislative response to greenhouse gas emissions in the time since. That’s the brief history of my involvement with the Clean Air Act issues. [An excellent book titled “Glacial” was just published that contains more in-depth detail of the work we did to pass cap and trade for greenhouse gas control] and there was one other thing I wanted to say about that.

Ren: And we’re at 3:15 just as a heads up.

Rick: I guess it’s stopping time.

Ren: No you’re okay. If there’s anything else that you want to add, these last couple minutes, if there’s like the question I asked you when we were looking at when you were at the State 01:15:00Senate, at the federal level, I know you mentioned the cap-and-trade just now, were there any other kind of initiatives and laws that you wish had crossed the line?

Rick: I wish that the cap-and-trade bill had been taken up by the Senate and passed because [the only way we will ever have the necessary global response to the challenge of climate change is for the US to be in the lead]. We need the developing world, China, India, other developing countries, to be a part of the process. We need to lead by example. We need to put controls in ourselves, because those countries that are lesser developed than we are going to look to us and say, okay you have not controlled, you have not done anything in the U.S.. Big and rich and developed as you are, how can you expect us to control our emissions when you’re not 01:16:00controlling your own? And until we lead by example, we’re not going to get very far in the international collaboration that is going to be required if we’re going to be successful in addressing the problem of climate change. So I’m sorry it didn’t pass, I think it was the right approach. I think we did exactly the right thing in the House in 2009 and hopefully the day will come where either that or some other meaningful and effective regulatory approach can be put in place.

Ren: Can I ask you one fun question, and we can take this out. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask your thoughts on the Speaker vote that’s been going on in the House of Representatives, which I got an alert on my phone that looks like we do have a Speaker of the House.

Rick: Oh really?

Ren: Yes, Mike Johnson it seems.

Rick: So he got his 218.

Ren: He got his 218, I’m just curious your thoughts.

Rick: I guess my only thought is it took long enough [laughter]. But I’m glad there is a Speaker, Congress 01:17:00needs to function.

Ren: Right and like I said we can take that part out Rick: No, I don’t care. You can leave it, we need to function. So good, I’m glad they elected someone.

Ren: I’ll say Rick Boucher, thank you so much again for your time.

Rick: Thank you Ren.

Ren: For speaking to me, I really appreciate it, thank you for your service, so thanks.

Rick: Okay thank you Ren. And thank you [to Kristin]. 01:18:00[End of interview]