Transportation, Housing And Urban Development, And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to give actually a little bit of a history lesson, to look back and also look forward. I ask my colleagues to join me in looking back some 300-and-almost-75 years. Roughly at that time the first Swedes and Finns sailed to America on a couple of boats, one of which was called the Kalmar Nyckel.

The first Swedes and Finns came to shore--actually, they came up the Delaware Bay, up into the Delaware River, and they took a left turn at an uncharted river and decided to name it after the child Queen of Sweden, naming the river the ``Christina River.'' They landed their boats at a place which we now call The Rocks and decided to name that area the ``Colony of New Sweden.'' The first Swedes, the first Finns in America came ashore in what is now really Wilmington, DE. For the first year, they never called it Wilmington, they called it the Colony of New Sweden.

They came by ships, and for about the next 300 years, a lot of ships were built along the banks of the Christina River, especially during the period from 1945 to 1946 during the heart of World War II. Among the ships that were built there were destroyer escorts, troop landing ships, and a variety of other ships that helped to win the war, helped to win World War II.

When World War II was at its most robust, fullest form, we had 10,000 people who worked on the banks of the Christina River building those ships. A few years after the war ended, what had been a vibrant shipbuilding area along the Christina River dried up, the activity went away. The war was won, and what had been a vibrant shipbuilding area became, over time, a decaying industrial wasteland with relatively little new activity.

In the 1960s, I-95 was built up the northeast corridor of our country, the mid-Atlantic part of our country, and it literally cut Wilmington, DE, in half. Off to the right, to the east of I-95, was the Christina River, and add to that the northeast corridor, the Amtrak main lines between Washington and Boston. The main line of Amtrak also sat between I-95 and the Christina River and served to make it difficult for people even to access the river, almost hard for them to even know it was there.

I became Governor in 1993, and toward the end of that year, I was visited by a former Governor, Russ Peterson, and by a former president of the University of Delaware.

They said: We have been thinking of an idea. We have actually been working under the direction of a joint resolution signed by former Governor Mike Castle to think about what the potential could be for development along the Christina River and the Brandywine Creek not far away. We haven't finished our job. We have had a good start on it, but we need more time. We are about to run out of time under the joint resolution. We wonder if we can have a little more time to think it through.

I said: Hey, look, I am up to my eyeballs in alligators. I have been Governor for less than a year. You guys take as much time as you need.

They went away, and I wasn't sure I would ever see them again or talk to them again. As it turns out, in about 6 months they came back, and they said: Do you remember our coming in and talking to you?

I said: Yes, I remember that.

They said: We have gone back and done more work on a vision, if you will, of what the Christina River, this industrial wasteland along either side of the river, of what it could be, and we would like to share that with you today.

I said: Have at it.

By that time, I had been Governor about a year and a half, things were settling down, and I was ready to listen. They had these big architect renderings of a riverfront that certainly looked nothing like the Christina River, didn't look at all like an industrial wasteland. There was a river
that was pristine, with parks, walking paths, boats out on the river, museums, restaurants, places for people to live, places for people to work, theaters, museums. And I never will forget--I looked at them. I was blown away by the vision.

I said to former Governor Peterson: Who is going to make all of this happen?

He looked me right in the eye and he said: You are.

I said: Why me?

He said: Well, because you are the Governor.

I said: Well, I love this vision, and let's see if we can't help to realize it.

I think that conversation was in 1994. Anybody who today takes the train up the northeast corridor and stops at the Wilmington train station would say we have made a lot of progress. The place is cleaned up. We actually have walking paths along the river. We have parks. We have beautiful places where people live and condominiums and apartments as well as other homes. We have restaurants and we have museums. We have hope--that is what I am here to talk about today--for a children's science museum along the riverfront. But it is a vision that has been realized. A lot of people come there to eat at restaurants along the riverfront. And the river itself is being cleaned up, the water quality is being cleaned up, and the environmental hazards, and so forth, the waste that was left there has been for the most part cleaned up.

Probably in another month or so, less than a month or so, we are going to open a 250-acre wildlife refuge named after former Governor Peterson, built in partnership with the DuPont Company and the Nature Education Center. People will come and just enjoy, literally on the outskirts of the city, a large, urban wildlife refuge with walking paths and see what might have been some 100 years ago or 50 years ago in that place.

About 10 years ago, when I was nearing the end of my time as Governor, my second term, a group of citizens in our State came to see me, and they said they were exited about the riverfront and what was happening there.

They said: You know, Delaware does not have a children's museum.

I think every other State does. We do not. In fact, it turns out there are about 250 children's museums across the country.

They said: We are interested in having a children's museum to go with all of the other attractions on the riverfront.

We talked about it for some time, and I said: I like the idea. I like the concept. But to tell you the truth, I would be a lot more interested in it if it were a children's science museum.

At the time, I was trying to figure out, how do we get kids motivated, excited about science, how do we get them excited about careers in science? It is all well and good, the State is big in tourism, big in financial services, we have had a great history with the chemical industry, shipbuilding at one time. But in our Nation and in my State, we need more scientists, we need more engineers, we need more people who have facility in mathematics and who are going to go out and become inventors, create things, things of value that will help us, among other things, create jobs in the 21st century. Whether it is in clean energy or conservation or wind, solar, new ways to create nuclear power, we need people with those credentials too.

It starts very young. We have adopted, in my State, rigorous academic standards for math and science, English and social studies, with a real focus on the math and science. We say: This is what we expect you to know and learn and be able to do. And we are going to measure students' progress on that. Most every State has done that. As I said earlier, most every other State has decided it is going to have its own children's museum.

I told the folks who presented their idea to me about a decade ago: If you want me to be involved, if you want me to be as excited as you are, I want to change the focus not just to be a children's museum in Delaware, I want it to be a children's museum that focuses on science. I want young kids in the target audience of 6 to 12 to come here and leave here excited about wanting to be astronauts or wanting to be environmentalists or wanting to create new ways to harness the energy of the Sun or the wind or to find ways to deal with spent fuel rods from nuclear powerplants. That is where my interest is.

Over time, the focus of this concept, this idea of the children's museum, has turned to focus on science, and to date I am told we have raised over $11 million for the project. We actually have picked out the building. I think they have a lease or a sort of a contract on a large structure right at the bend of the Christina River there in Wilmington, which is where Kahunaville used to be. Kahunaville sort of conveys the idea of a good time, and for many years, people went there and had a really good time. It was a great nightclub with some big acts over the years. Bob Dylan performed there and Hall and Oats, all kinds of people over the years. It is no longer a nightclub; it is an empty building, and it is a large empty building that actually lends itself to being, we think, a terrific site for a science museum for the kids of Delaware.

So far to date we have raised, as I said, over $11 million. To date, the Federal Government has provided about $250,000. So out of over $11 million, less than 3 percent has come from the Federal Government.

I have asked for an appropriation, a directed appropriation, of about another $198,000, and I appreciate very much the support of the Appropriations Committee to include that amount. If it is included in what we have already appropriated, it would be about $450,000 out of a budget of roughly $11.5 million--roughly 4 percent of the total project. A lot of the money is going to come from the private sector, a fair amount from local sources, State and local sources, as well.

I will give you a flavor of the kinds of exhibits we are going to have there. I will mention the names of some of the sponsors. The DuPont Company has been great, and it is a wonderful environmental company. It has agreed to help sponsor over the next couple of years an exhibit that focuses on environmental issues, I think largely focusing on estuaries. We have a big estuary in the Delaware Bay and not far away in the Chesapeake Bay. This will really excite our kids about the water and preserving the quality of our water and improving the quality of our water. AstraZeneca is going to help us create an exhibit on the human body, something interactive that the kids can really get into and enjoy and learn from. One of our larger banks, JPMorgan Chase, is going to help us with a project to focus on financial literacy. If there is anything that would help us all, young and old, that is, I think the events of the last year or two have pointed this out. We will have exhibits that focus on clean energy, whether it is wind, solar. We will have ways to use wind and solar, to show and demonstrate how we rely on those. We will have an exhibit that will focus on conservation, smart grid, to show how we can be better consumers, smarter consumers. We will have some focus on, among other things, nuclear energy and show how we actually create electricity from nuclear power. Those are some of the dynamics.

Our vision is, that when the kids leave the children's science museum on the banks of the Christina River, they will be juiced, they will be excited, and they will want to come back. But just as importantly, when they go back to class the next day or the next week, they will be thinking about their math assignments and even their science assignments a little bit differently and trying to provide a connection: How is what I am learning in my classroom relevant to what is going on in our world? How is it relevant to what I might be doing as a life work later on when I am finished with school and go out into the world?

We need more scientists, we need more engineers. I know we need both of those. We need people who have a lot of expertise in math. We need people who are going to invent things to help us make this a better world. And for what I think is a fairly modest investment on behalf of the Federal Government--about 4 percent of a much bigger project--I think this is a very good investment, and not just for kids in Delaware but for the kids who are going to graduate from the schools and go on and do things in their life to help all of us in Delaware and across the country and maybe even around the world.

Those are some of the reasons I have asked for this appropriation. I am
grateful to the Congress for supporting this a year ago. When we asked for about $250,000, it was included. With this money, if we are successful in gaining this appropriation, we will be able to go forward and hopefully actually open the Delaware children's science museum in the spring of next year, which would be a very good thing, not just for us in Delaware, not just for those who visit Delaware, but I think, on a broader scale, for a lot of folks in our country.

I see I have been joined by the former Governor of Virginia, in whose State I visited a number of those children's museums, those science museums. I remember taking our boys, when they were between the ages of 6 and 12, to a couple of them around the country. Just remember, we have one who is a mechanical engineer, at a 4-year college up in Boston, and his little brother--now a very big brother--he is really good in math and a bunch of other things as well, and I think maybe a little bit of that came from those visits all those years ago.

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