It was a beautiful sunny busy day for us on Capitol Hill today. We started the morning at the conference headquarters to hear an address from National League of Cities President Bart Peterson, who is also the Mayor of Indianapolis, Indiana. We also had a chance to hear about half of the morning’s keynote address from political pundit and columnist David Gergen.
He had to take off during the Gergen speech because we needed to catch a cab over to Capitol Hill for our first meeting of the day with Minnesota 7th District Congressman Jim Oberstar’s office. We met with one of Congressman Oberstar’s staffmembers, Mr. Bill Richard. We spent our time with Mr. Richard talking about transportation issues. Planes, trains, and automobiles. We talked about our new relationship with Flying Cloud Airport; the City support of the proposed extension of LRT from Minneapolis to Eden Prairie; and asking for continued federal support for highway projects at the intersection of 494 & 169.
Next, we were off to the Longworth Building to meet with Minnesota 2nd District Congressman John Kline’s staff. We met with Legislative Assistant Casey Buboltz to talk about one issue: WAFTA. WAFTA is the Western Area Fire Training Association. WAFTA was formed in the early 1970’s after the U.S. Defense Department transferred ownership of a former NIKE missile base in Carver County to a group of eleven small cities who joined together to acquire the site for use as a location to train fire fighters. Well, the site was used for a couple decades then generally abandoned for its original use. The site, however, is contaminated and needs to be cleaned-up. Eight of the eleven WAFTA cities are in Congressman Kline’s district, as is the WAFTA site itself. Three of the WAFTA cities are in Congressman Ramstad’s District. We’re here looking for federal assistance to clean-up the pollution at the WAFTA site. We’ll talk to Congressman Ramstad about it tomorrow.
After our meeting with Congressman Kline’s staff, we headed over to the Hart Senate Office Building to visit with Senator Coleman’s staff. The photo above is of Chief Esbensen and Council Member Butcher outside the Dirksen-Hart office building. The other photo is of Chief Esbensen and me talking with Senator Coleman’s legislative assistant Jordan Talge. We did not have much time with Jordan. The Senator needed him today. But with the short time we did have, we covered WAFTA (again), asked for greater levels of homeland security funding, asked for the Senator to hold Nextel to the concessions they agreed to fund to public safety agencies (I’ll talk more about this later), and shared information with Jordan about our local Partnership for Emergency Readiness.
Tonight, Chief Esbensen and I are having dinner with Eden Prairie Police Department Lt. Jim DeMann. Lt. DeMann has been out here at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA. He’s in the 10th week of a 10 week program. He graduates on Friday. We’re meeting up with him for some Irish food at a pub around the corner. It’ll be nice to see him and hear how things are going.
More tomorrow……..
