Lloyd Bentsen, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Republican Sen. Joining Herrington in the news conference were jubilant members of the Texas delegation, among them Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright Democratic Sen. It will also not hurt, these analysts added, that President-elect George Bush’s official home is Texas. “I have to tell you,” Herrington told a news conference, “there are no politics in this.”Ĭongressional sources, however, noted that few states stand a better chance of navigating a multibillion-dollar project through the shoals of Congress as it grapples with a huge federal budget deficit than Texas.
He said that the committee had awarded Texas alone an “outstanding” rating on the four most important site selection criteria-geological conditions, regional resources, environment and “setting,” a category that included local political support and ease of land acquisition.
#SUPERCOLLIDER WAXAHACHIE TEXAS FREE#
Herrington, insisting that the selection of Texas was free of politics, said the department committee operated independently of senior officials and presented its findings to him only last Tuesday. Dixon (D-Ill.) argued that incorporating the existing Fermilab machine as a starting booster for the supercollider would cut construction costs by $426 million and annual operating costs by $88 million.īut Hess, who headed the department’s site review committee, said this approach would have yielded no more than about $300 million in savings over the lifetime of the project, a figure he termed “interesting but not significant.” Hess also noted that political opposition to the project existed in Illinois, mostly among landowners around the proposed site. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), contending that no other location “could match the Illinois site point for point,” said Congress itself should examine how Texas was chosen.ĭisappointment appeared keenest in Illinois, the home of Fermilab, now the nation’s leading center of high-energy physics, with its 4-mile-long Tevatron accelerator.Ĭharging that the decision to award the project to Texas was “based on politics rather than on merit and the good of the American taxpayer,” Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) called on the congressional General Accounting Office to review the objectivity of the selection process, while Sen. One official, calling it a “dumb” idea, worried that the name would only add to the impression of political taint in awarding a major federal plum. Some department officials, however, privately expressed anguish at what appeared to be Herrington’s personal decision to break with tradition and name a major national facility for a sitting President. In addition to announcing its location, Herrington declared that the atom smasher would be named the “Ronald Reagan Center for High Energy Physics,” in tribute to “the President who had the vision to move forward with the outstanding scientific project of this century.” Hess, the agency’s associate director for high energy and nuclear physics. The final selection, however, was based on scores assigned to the remaining six sites by an internal Energy Department committee of 10 scientists and managers, headed by Dr.
Herrington said that the Texas site had “no significant overall weaknesses” and was “superior” to those in six other finalist states-Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina and Tennessee.Ĭalifornia, initially considered a leading contender, was eliminated last December by a review committee of the National Academy of Sciences, which expressed concern about the geological suitability of two sites promoted by the state.
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