We finished up our National League of Cities (NLC) trip in Washington DC yesterday with a morning conference session with Senators Norm Coleman, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd and Joe Biden as the speakers. Senator Coleman spoke to the conference as a former Mayor. He gave an excellent speaker and got a standing ovation from the 3,000+ city officials in the audience. The three Democratic senators that followed Senator Coleman spoke on the themes they each planned to advance in their respective Presidential campaigns. The NLC invited all declared Presidential candidates. These were the three candidates that accepted the invitation.
Following this session, we trudged up to Capitol Hill again to meet with 3rd District Congressman Jim Ramstad and his senior legislative assistant Adam Peterman. This was our longest meeting of the two days. Congressman Ramstad is an engaging and intelligent man. He has great recall of local events. When we sit down with him we get right to the issues. We talked about airports, trains, highway, access to the Minnesota River Valley, public safety radio spectrum, homeland security spending, community development block grants, and WAFTA. Congressman Ramstad will assist Congressman Kline with our WAFTA policy needs. He also committed to helping set up a meeting for the City with officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to discuss the City’s hopes to provide greater access to the MN River Valley with bike trails.
Following our meeting with Congressman Ramstad, we headed over to the Russell Senate Office Building to meet with Mr. Thomas Sullivan, a legislative assistant to Senator Amy Klobuchar. We covered the same range of issues with Mr. Sullivan. This was our first meeting with Senator Klobuchar’s Office. It went well. In fact, it looks like Senator Klobuchar could be particularly helpful to us with WAFTA.
While we were visiting Senator Klobuchar’s Office, we had the opportunity to meet briefly with Miss Minnesota Nicole Swanson. We had our photo take with Ms. Swanson by Senator Klobuchar’s staff. They told us they like to take photos of all of their visitors. The staff person emailed this photo to me yesterday. She told us that this year’s Miss Minnesota context will be held at Eden Prairie High School later this spring.
It was a busy couple of days in Washington DC. We shared our City’s interests with our federal legislators. They were polite and helpful. They will keep us informed as our issues are debated, discussed and decided.
