Lobbying the Hill: an inside look

WASHINGTON – Among the white marble columns and red velvet curtains of the nation’s most storied congressional rooms, some 50 people on a mission from the Inland Northwest last week did the big schmooz, chatting up folks who could be the key to the region’s future success.

This group of businessmen and women, political leaders and academics from the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene area, was ending the first day of a three-day blitz of the Capitol, talking up the value of local projects that need money or highlighting the problems of government policies that need fixing.

The day’s capstone event was a reception for about 200 in the Russell Senate Building hearing room. It is the place where Sen. Joe McCarthy’s demagoguery was exposed, Watergate dissected and Iran-Contra unraveled. As sunny and snowy images of the Inland Northwest cycled on a pair of oversized monitors in the middle of the room, they made the rounds.

Rep. Cathy McMorris stopped by briefly at the beginning of the event before heading for a special-invitation affair at the White House. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., also made an appearance before being called away to a vote.

But the members of Congress weren’t the real targets of this event. The leaders from Spokane and Coeur d’Alene were making connections with the small army of staff who serve the two states’ senators and representatives, and they can be the difference between a local project becoming an inserted line in a large national bill or falling by the wayside in the crush of legislation.

The goal was to put a face with a name, and a name with a project, to make sure a project winds up in a bill.

In other words, the folks from the Inland Northwest were lobbying.

Not the “slip you a campaign contribution for a favor, wink-wink” activity that many Americans may associate with lobbying in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal.

Instead, they were engaged in the more common and harder form of that activity, the “show up with my best presentation, make my strongest case, thank you for everything you’ve done in the past and ask you for help with something else this time” kind of lobbying.

They’d be at it for two more days, during a time when Congress was being denounced for spending too much money and fighting over so-called lobbying reform.

The Inland Northwest delegates might not know if they succeeded for months, or even years.

A well-rehearsed agenda

For more than a decade, groups from the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce have made annual trips to Washington, D.C., to talk about local concerns with congressional staff and the people from federal agencies who make the rules and carry out the policies that Congress dictates.

The cast of characters and priorities change each year, and about five years ago the group expanded to include business and community leaders from North Idaho.

With so many interests, they must pick carefully the topics they will mention during their main presentations. In 2005, a key focus was on protecting Fairchild Air Force Base, the region’s largest employer and source of federal funding, from closure.

This year Fairchild is safe from the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, and members of the group always thanked senators and representatives for last year’s support. This year the group is seeking $18.5 million for a Mission Support Center, plus any other jobs or missions the Air Force would like to send to the West Plains base.

“I’ve always considered Fairchild to be one of our bases,” said Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo in acknowledging that support and making clear he hopes that people from the Spokane area consider Mountain Home Air Force Base near Boise one of theirs.

Also on the agenda were highway and railroad projects, federal help with cleaning up pollution in the water that moves out of North Idaho and into Eastern Washington, and “work force development,” a phrase that covers all education and training after high school.

Each topic had a designated presenter, and each presenter had two minutes. Shorter presentations leave more time for elected officials and high-ranking agency officials to talk and take questions.

The 2006 agenda has some big-ticket items, like an ongoing pledge of $15 million per year, for 30 years, to clean up pollution in the Coeur d’Alene basin, and $40 million for an effort to “bridge the Spokane Valley” by combining rail lines and eliminating rail crossings. Washington State University in Spokane would like $1.5 million for studies at its Sleep Research Center to find better safety standards for long-haul drivers. And there were others.

Good projects, said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

But that may not be enough, not this year, said Murray, who temporarily left the debate over the emergency spending bill for the war in Iraq and hurricane cleanup to meet with the group. The deficit is growing, and less of the federal budget is available for “discretionary” items.

“It’s one of the toughest budget years I’ve seen,” she said.

Pollution standards

Not everything on the agenda comes with a price tag. One thorny issue involves environmental cleanup of the water that flows out of Lake Coeur d’Alene, through Spokane and into Long Lake. It involves the two states, communities along the waterway and the Coeur d’Alene Indian Tribe. The two states have different standards, known as total maximum daily loads, for pollution.

Idaho’s standard is the same as the federal government’s, said Jonathan Coe of the Coeur d’Alene Chamber of Commerce. Washington’s is stricter. But because Idaho is upstream and the water doesn’t really recognize state boundaries, North Idaho might be forced to apply Washington’s stricter standards for water coming into that state.

States that want to set a looser standard than the federal government need to present studies and scientific evidence that the environment will be adequately protected, Coe told members of Congress and high-level representatives of federal agencies. Shouldn’t states that want tougher standards also be required to have proof that those rules make sense? he asked.

Pollution standards also affect new sewer treatment facilities the Spokane community plans to build before it runs out of sewer treatment capacity in 2011, said Spokane County Commissioner Todd Mielke.

It takes five years to design, build and get a treatment facility running. With time running out, Spokane has offered to use the best technology available and aim for the highest level of treatment available, Mielke said. But environmental officials in Washington state say the federal government won’t let Spokane do that, while the Environmental Protection Agency says it is the state that won’t accept it.

“Each side is pointing to the other and saying, ‘There’s your problem,’ ” Mielke told Brent Fewell, the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for water.

“We need certainty if we’re going to ask the ratepayers for $400 million” to build treatment facilities, added Susan Ashe, Spokane’s director of legislative and public affairs.

Fewell agreed and promised to check with the agency’s Northwest regional office. “We’re not about stopping growth,” he said. Spokane should be able to set a reasonable goal for water quality in 10 years, he said, and if the community falls short, continue to work toward it.

Later, Mielke said the session with Fewell was one of the “ah-ha” moments of the trip.

A united front

Presenting a large, united front is a key element of the chamber’s lobbying trip, said Rich Hadley, Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce president.

With 52 people, the group was too large for the average congress member’s office, so senators and representatives came to rooms in the Capitol reserved for them.

Members of Congress are tightly scheduled, Tim Peckinpaugh, the chamber’s Washington, D.C., lobbyist, told the Inland Northwest delegation the first day. Fifteen minutes is usually a lot of time, and the delegation was getting a half hour with most of the elected officials from the two states.

Although it is only the end of April, Congress often works only Tuesday through Thursday so members from Western states can travel home for the weekend. With scheduled recesses, and the likelihood that Congress will want to adjourn in early fall for re-election campaigns, there are about 45 days of actual business left and every 15 minutes is scheduled.

Last week Congress had just returned from two weeks off, so more people than usual wanted just a few minutes with their senators or representatives.

But there is strength in numbers, the chamber delegation discovered. Some elected officials came a few minutes later or had to leave a few minutes early, but none who have constituents in Eastern Washington or North Idaho failed to show up.

Petition the government

For the 51 weeks of the year when Inland Northwest leaders are not scouring the capital, Peckinpaugh of Preston, Gates, Ellis is the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce’s lobbyist. It has been his profession for about 20 years, and an honorable one, he said, despite the recent black-eye from recently convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

“All we are is representatives of clients,” he said during an interview on the final day of the blitz. “In the Constitution, it says it’s the right of the people to petition their government for redress.”

The term “earmark” – a specific request for spending in a particular place – has become pejorative in recent weeks. As Congress struggled with lobbying reforms last week, the House tried to pass a law that makes any addition to a spending bill carry the name of the senator or representative who puts it in. That caused a minor revolt among some members of the House Appropriations Committee, who could become targets for critics of federal spending.

“All an earmark is, is Congress saying what should be spent. The entire federal budget, technically, is earmarks,” Peckinpaugh said. The most notorious example of targeted spending on a special local project, a bridge in Alaska dubbed “the bridge to nowhere,” wouldn’t be covered by the new rule, he added. It was put into an authorization bill, not a spending bill.

None of the projects the Inland Northwest delegation was pushing would wilt under the scrutiny of budget critics, he said.

But receiving money for a new project may be a different question, and some proponents of new projects may have to lower their expectations or wait a while for an earmark. Congress is working hard to find money for some projects already under way, said Connie Partoyan, chief of staff to Rep. McMorris.

“It’s even more difficult for new projects,” she said. Some projects should be looking for grants from government or private agencies instead of congressional earmarks.

Not everyone in the chamber delegation had a particular program or project that needed attention. Eastern Washington University’s new president, Rodolfo Arevalo, accompanied the university’s lobbyist, Jeff Gombosky, on the trip, and the two took breaks from the back-to-back staff presentations to get “face time” with members of Congress.

“We don’t need anything specifically,” said Gombosky, a former state legislator from Spokane. But Arevalo has been president for less than a month, and everyone in the delegation knew his predecessor very well.

A subgroup detoured to the Pentagon for a meeting with high-ranking Air Force officers, which included a three-star general and a two-star general who had served as wing commanders at Fairchild in years past and had fond memories of their time there. All of it is lobbying. Partoyan said groups like the chamber may be the best lobbyists there are.

“Lobbying is really groups like this, coming to talk to their government,” she said. The chamber’s group was large and well-organized and probably more effective because it was regionally focused, she said.

But even after three days on and around Capitol Hill, some members of the chamber delegation shied away from the professional title.

“I lobbied,” insisted Susan Meyer of the Spokane Transit Authority as she waited at Ronald Reagan National Airport for the trip home. “But I am not a lobbyist.”