New incentives and team solutions. President Clinton travels to New Jersey today to announce a bold new environmental effort to revitalize our communities: A $2 billion Brownfields tax incentive for those who clean up and redevelop contaminated, abandoned properties. He also visits a Superfund site near an elementary school in Wallington, N.J., where cleanup has stopped as a result of the budget impasse, and which may never be cleaned entirely as a result of Republican efforts in Congress to cut Superfund monies.

Brownfields: A solution of teamwork. President Clinton's Brownfields Initiative encourages businesses and communities to turn old, polluted industrial sites into homes for safe, sustainable businesses. Today's Brownfields tax incentive announcement reflects the best of what we can do together to protect our environment and revitalize our cities: Individuals, businesses, communities, and government at all levels working together to meet our shared challenges.

Progress on the environment. After three years of the Clinton Administration, we have accomplished a great deal. For example, President Clinton has:

• Expanded community right to know laws. This new legislation requires industries to tell our citizens exactly what substances are being released into the air and water.
• Worked to cut toxic air pollution from chemical plants by 90 percent.
• Helped 50 million Americans breathe cleaner air, in 55 cities across this land.

Realizing that new problems require new, flexible solutions, the President is also:

• Cutting paperwork at the E.P.A. by 25 percent.
• Encouraging new solutions, with programs like Project XL, which helps stimulate responsible businesses to find inexpensive, efficient ways to meet our tough pollution standards, and his Common Sense initiative for small businesses which emphasizes results, not punishment.

Presidential leadership. The Brownfields Initiative is yet another example of how President Clinton has combined leadership, appeals to corporate citizenship and to all Americans to work together to meet America's challenges.

President Clinton has shown we can balance the budget in seven years while upholding our values and protecting the environment. One of our great challenges is to provide a clean and healthy environment for today and tomorrow. Now is not the time to turn our back on 25 years of bipartisan progress on protecting our environment.

Republicans are threatening to shut down the government for a third time if the President does not accept deep cuts in the environment that are not necessary to balance the budget. The President will stand against those efforts, and stand up for our values.

Republican cuts have taken the environmental cop off the beat and are delaying the cleanup of many toxic waste sites.

? The EPA has already been forced to miss 40% of its inspections -- putting families and children at risk and allowing polluters to get away with breaking the law.

? Continuing the current Republican cuts will slow the cleanup of many of the more than 400 sites where cleanups are already underway, including the site the President visits today. These clean-up efforts are vital to the health of the more than 10 million children under the age of 12 who live within 4 miles of a toxic waste site.

? The Republican environmental cuts are jeopardizing our ability to protect clean drinking water -- and are standing in the way of our fight against dangerous pollutants like cryptosporidium, the microbial contaminant that killed 100 people in Milwaukee in 1993.