part of the cities not planning themselves properly and the Federal Government has to come in as the parent of the child and say, "You are not living properly, this is the way we think you ought to live." You don't say anything about this open end section. I agree with annexation. I think the city should take over contiguous areas around it that may add to its taxable revenue and tax base, that is good, but if you do annex the city you should have a planning board that would control the use of that annexation to the good advantage of the community itself.

Mr. BINGHAM. Mr. Chairman, I believe Mr. Patrick McLaughlin, legislative representative of the American Municipal Association would like to make a brief statement.

Mr. MCLAUGHLIN. I think this: there has been some misunderstanding on this open spaces. There is nothing in this bill which would permit a core city, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, to go out into the outlying areas and buy land there. It does not alter in any respect the sovereign powers of surrounding areas. The surrounding areas, people who live in Montgomery County, Md., people who live in Westchester County, or the surrounding counties to Philadelphia, they are interested in protecting open space in their counties. They are the ones who are going to need it and who are going to take it, not the big cities.

Mr. RAINS. In other words, there is nothing in the bill that gives any city authority to acquire any land outside its territory. Mr. BINGHAM. Well, what is this open section? definite use of land for an indefinite period of time.

It is for an inMr. RAINS. Thank you, Mr. Bingham, we appreciate your testimony.

Our next witness is the representative of the National Association of County Officials. We have the Honorable Dan Gray, the Honorable Anne Wilkins, and the Honorable Edward Connor.

I want the committee to know that Mr. Gray, the president of the National Association of County Officials, is my lifetime friend, my nextdoor neighbor, and I am delighted to have him here. I understand there is a gentleman here from Mrs. Griffiths' district.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I happen to represent the very best people and Mr. Connor, my constituent and a member of our council is certainly one of them. I am happy to see you here. We are happy to have you, gentlemen. You may proceed.

STATEMENT OF DAN. W. GRAY, CHAIRMAN, BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS, CALHOUN COUNTY, ALA.; PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COUNTY OFFICIALS

Mr. GRAY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It is a pleasure to be here. I thought maybe you wouldn't tell us where I was from and they would think I was from Brooklyn. I am going to make it brief.

I know you hear a lot of people, but we think we represent the people back home.

The National Association of County Associations, of which I am president, represents over 3,000 counties in the United States. We have active organizations in 44 States and we have people back at the

home level here today for you to hear, who can bring you the information that will be grateful and helpful to you in trying to come up with a bill which we think is good.

The first is Mr. John McGrady. Mr. McGrady is a law graduate, but what I would like to bring out very much is he formerly served as a member of the Allegheny County Redevelopment Authority. He is from a heavily urbanized and industrialized county with a popu

lation in excess of 1 million.

I would also like to bring out here that we in our county government represent counties from the size of 5,900,000 down to 385 people, so we think we represent all sections of government throughout the United States.

Our second witness is one of the outstanding women in public life and one of the real leaders in local government. She is Mrs. Anne Wilkins, chairman of the Board of Supervisors of Fairfax County, where I am sure some of you live. She is an outstanding authority on urban planning and under her leadership, Fairfax County has not only met the rigors of sudden urbanization, but has become in the process, we think, one of the best administered units of local government anywhere in America.

She has worked on this very hard with our association for many years.

Our third is the Honorable Ed Connor, who holds the dual position of supervisor of Wayne County and councilman of the city of Detroit. He is a member of the Advisory Commission on Inter-Governmental Relations, and is a member of the board of directors of the National Association of County Officials.

First, I would like to present Mr. John McGrady.
Mr. RAINS. You may proceed, Mr. McGrady.

STATEMENT OF JOHN E. MCGRADY, COMMISSIONER, ALLEGHENY COUNTY, PA.

Mr. MCGRADY. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is John E. McGrady of Pittsburgh, Pa., and I am county commissioner of Allegheny County. I have 25 years experience in county government and in addition to my present position as county commissioner, I have served as county treasurer and as a member of the Allegheny County Redevelopment Authority.

I should like to limit my remarks to those sections of the bill dealing with urban renewal and planning.

Allegheny County is similar to many in the United States. We have Pittsburgh as our central core and surrounding it are some 128 municipalities, boroughs and townships, inhabited by citizens who are very self-conscious and very much devoted to home rule.

These communities range from bedroom communities to the mushrooming growth of the last few years and then we go into the old industrial areas, names that are familiar with most of the members of the committee, I think, towns like the Borough of Carnegie, the Borough of Braddock, where the homes originally were built before the turn of the century.

These have just by old age, come into a period of decay and obsolescence and blight. The Housing and Home Administrators—I

recall the comment of one of them when he viewed the Braddock area. He called it the most blighted area he had seen in the United States. This is the situation that many of these industrial communities are confronted with and we as county officials, are very much concerned about bringing them back to economic health and vitality. The Federal Government has been generous with the county redevelopment authority in Allegheny County. We now have already acquired property in four localities and we are in three of them presently offering the land for sale and we hope soon to have developers come in and revitalize these communities.

Now, I feel as a county commissioner, and I would like to digress here a moment and tell you, Congressman McDonough, that I feel that many of the counties, they look with admiration and respect on what you have done in your own community, and we, too, are trying to do everything within our financial power and through means of education to teach the people the need of doing things for themselves.

Now, we have taken over recently and enlarged it through the county, our county health department. We have codes and regulations, plumbing codes and sanitary codes, building codes and other restrictions whereby we may enforce these codes in the neighborhoods to keep them from becoming blighted.

We also have a planning commission and we have for the county of Allegheny over 65 percent of the work done on a master plan and many of the communities who are unable to do things by themselves have banded together as maybe five or six communities will, for a project, whether it be in the school district or whether it will be a sanitary facility or whether it will be in the area of streets and parks and so on, and further if I may go into another field for a moment, we have tried to preserve open space in our county.

Recently, through the State foundations, we were able to go out and explore what little raw land was left in Allegheny County and we have acquired eight regional parks, six of which are under development at the present time, in addition to the over 5,000 acres we have in our North and South Park in Allegheny County.

These are the things that we are trying to do and we are trying to do them as communities, small communities trying to help themselves, but these people find that it is impossible for them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps without some financial aid.

This is, as I say, the reason I am here, to speak in behalf of communities such as these that are badly in need of help. I would like to impress deeply upon you, if I could, that these people are people who are interested in doing well for their community, who want to uplift the living standards of the people in the community, and this I find is the thing that-this instrument of the redevelopment authority which is created under our laws of Pennsylvania, is the tool by which this thing can be done and I would most heartily urge and recommend that the recommendations set forth in my statement to you recommending an extension may be up to 75 percent of grant in communities in less than maybe 100,000 population, these are the things that I think the people in the community need.

Mr. RAINS. Thank you, Mr. McGrady. Down at the bottom of page 2 of your statement you mention two possible amendments. One of those amendments would minimize the burden of urban renewal

for smaller communities by raising the Federal contribution from two-thirds to three-fourths. I am all for this amendment.

The second one has been considerably talked about-about letting hospitals have the same advantages that now go to universities in the urban renewal program, but I might tell you that I note that the administration opposes that particular amendment. I am greatly interested in it.

I don't know what will happen from it. Before we go further with the questioning, I think we would like to hear from the other witnesses. Who is the next witness?

Mr. GRAY. Mrs. Anne Wilkins.

Mr. RAINS. We read about you in the papers a lot, Mrs. Wilkins. We are delighted to see you. While I don't live in Fairfax County, I live just across the creek from it and we are glad to have you here. STATEMENT OF MRS. ANNE WILKINS, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF SUPERVISORS, FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA.

Mrs. WILKINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today on the open space bill. As an elected county official and as vice chairman of the Federal Real Property Committee of the National Association of County Officials, I appreciate this opportunity to appear before your committee.

We are interested and concerned about the preservation of open spaces. I would like to comment that the gentleman who just preceded me represents one kind of county and I represent another kind of county. As Mr. Gray said, the counties of this country vary in size and in scope of their local government facilities.

Mr. McGrady represents a county that includes many small local towns; I assume there are towns and cities both within his county, while my county has the local government totally under its control.

I think it is interesting to notice that in the Washington metropolitan area there are only 7 actual units of local government, whereas in many metropolitan areas of similar size, you find as many as several hundred. We are very fortunate in that the control is in the hands of seven local boards instead of in many hundreds as in many metropolitan areas.

Therefore, I would like to comment on the limitation of funds for community facilities to towns of a hundred thousand or less. It seems to me that the problems of a large united county are equally as difficult to handle as they are in communities of 100,000, simply because ours are under one government rather than six or eight governments. The counties want to comment on H.R. 6423.

The National Association of County Officials had not taken a position on this previously. We had a survey made quite recently in order to determine what the present feeling was amoung the counties of the Nation on this matter and an analysis of the results showed that 37 counties, which reported with a total population of 17 mililon persons or 10 percent of the total national population, favored grants for open-space acquisition whereas 11 counties representing a little over 1 million persons did not favor this type of legislation.

The proponents also indicated that their county would probably articipate in a program of this nature should these open-space proons be enacted into law. The supporting attitudes toward this

legislation were aptly summarized in a letter from Mr. R. E. Weaver, executive secretary-engineer of the Summit County, Ohio, Planning Commission.

That county, incidentally, has a population of 513,000 persons. He stated as follows:

We, who have the responsibility of planning for the future of this county, are becoming more aware, as each day passes, of the necessity of securing adequate open space in this highly urbanized area. If we are to plan for properly developed growth with adequate water supply and recreation areas to serve this expected population, we will need proper legislation to enable us to carry out any plan we might develop.

We are not certain how our county will react to making available funds to participate in receipt of matching Federal funds, but we feel this recognition by the Federal Government of this national problem will make our local citizens more receptive to any program which we may develop. A study of this area has already been completed which indicates that by 1980 this county will need an additional 7,360 acres for recreation facilities alone.

We hope that recognition of this problem on a Federal level will enable us to strengthen our requirements of allotment developers to set aside areas in proposed subdivisions and a bill to provide matching Federal funds may assist us in developing a plan for providing local funds to participate in securing portions of the developers land at his cost.

The opposite viewpoint was expressed in some counties. One Midwestern county states as follows:

The system of Federal grants should end. I believe this should be done by the States and local units.

I think it is easy to conceive of the difficulty of a gentleman standing in the middle of many miles of ploughed fields in the center of the State of Iowa or Nebraska or other Midwestern States having difficulty in conceiving of the idea of the necessity for preserving open spaces in the metropolitan areas.

As you can see, the majority of the counties responding to this questionnaire would favor the type of legislation embodied in H.R. 6423. The financial assistance which would be available through this bill would provide the opportunity for local governments to acquire and preserve open-space lands prior to its being plowed under by the force of urban expansion.

The long-range planning which would be required will provide impetus at the citizen level for an immediate recognition of the need to project and crystallize present ideas concerning community development into tangible plans.

The national population trends indicate to us that within a very few years more than 70 percent of the Nation's population will be in urban centers, urban areas. The urban counties surrounding the existing cities, which have felt the most of this growth and will continue to do so, have found great difficulty in meeting the needs of these new population forces.

My own county of Fairfax, for example, has grown from 98,000 in 1950, to 260,000 today. We have had great difficulty but have succeeded in providing $50 million worth of schools, and $30 million worth of sewers to mention two essential services within that period. But we have a great problem because most of the property is residential and the taxes from residential property seldom pay their way.

We have been able to do a great deal in the preservation of open spaces. We have recently started a program for the acquisition of stream valley parks and large open-space parks.