Day One was yesterday. My flight into Charlotte was smooth. The plane was full of Minnesota city officials on their way to this conference. Councilmember Sherry Butcher and I were on the same flight. We picked up our conference credentials, walked the exhibitor floor, and then finished the evening with dinner with Councilmember Ron Case and his wife.
On Day Two, Councilmembers Brad Aho and Phil Young joined Councilmembers Case and Butcher and me for the opening general session. The lead speaker for the session was NLC President Anthony Williams, Mayor of Washington, DC. This will be Mayor Williams’ final week as the NLC President, as his term is coming to an end. He has also announced that he will not be running for a third term as DC’s mayor. The keynote speaker for the session was former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. He talked about his views of the economy and what he thinks we need to do as a nation to compete in the world economy.
For the rest of the day, our Eden Prairie group split up and covered many individual conference sessions. I attended a session sponsored by Microsoft on a new product called MS Business Scorecard Manager 2005. It is a product that enables managers to use data to better manage their operations. We’ve been interested in something just like this, so it was a good session. Following this session I attended a session on citizen engagement using e-government tools. Another good session.
In addition to the conference sessions, we had the opportunity to meet with the City Administrator and a Councilmember from Eagan, Minnesota, about a golf course development that occured recently in their City that has some similarities to the anticipated development proposal we think we’re going to receive soon for the Bent Creek Golf Course. It gave us some good perspective of what might be coming our way soon.
Tomorrow, there’s more to come.
