News from NACo's 2010 Legislative Conference
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
(Washington, D.C.) Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama's Domestic Policy Council head, Melody Barnes and Department of Labor Assistant Secretary William Spriggs headlined today's morning general session, while Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke at the conference luncheon.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Rep. George Miller (D.-Calif.) will introduce a bill tomorrow that “allows for county governments and municipalities to retain workers.” She offered no details.
Speaking at the General Session, Pelosi focused on her and the Obama administration’s priorities, particularly jobs and “health insurance reform.”
Highlighting jobs-specific legislation, Pelosi said the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act, passed last week, will provide $15 billion for infrastructure investments in local communities. She said the health reform bill is also a jobs bill that would create “4 million jobs in its life” and “about 400,000 jobs very soon.”
She said the health reform bill Congress sends to the president “will ensure affordability for the middle class, accountability for the insurance companies, and access for millions more Americans, tens of millions.”
In closing, she called on county leaders to lend their support. “The challenges that we all face are too great to face them alone. We need to form the partnerships, strengthen partnerships at every level of government.”
U.S Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius praised counties for stemming the spread of the H1N1 virus.
The vaccination campaign depended on county governments’ work, which was complicated by budget cuts necessitated by the recession.
As governor of Kansas, Sebelius herself cut the state health and human services budget, admitting it is often the first department to see cuts, and her successor has continued on that path. She said the Recovery Act has helped fund safety net services, but they may not last until people get back on their feet.
Sebelius stressed the importance of counties’ close relationships with residents in guiding health care policy creation.
“Rather than figuring out strategies in Washington, we want your input,” she said. “You’re the laboratories and we can help take the solutions to scale.”
Melody Barnes started off her speech by thanking Linn County, Iowa Supervisor Linda Langston; Santa Clara County, Calif. Supervisor Liz Kniss and Tarrant County, Texas Commissioner Roy Brooks for their leadership in health care reform. Barnes focused on the Obama Administration's commitment to governing differently. "The thinking needs to be different. It has to be people and place-based," she said, adding, "The days of the federal government thinking and talking and working in silos is over."
Barnes went on to detail programs that the administration has begun that reflect the new way of governing. She highlighted the Promise Neighborhoods and Choice Neighborhoods initiatives from the Departments of Education, and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the TIGER grant program, which was developed by the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency and HUD.
The U.S. Department of Labor wants to foster a recovery that helps all Americans with good jobs, said Assistant Labor Secretary William Spriggs at the morning’s general session. Good jobs, Spriggs said, pay a fair wage, provide work and life flexibility, and are performed in safe and healthy workplace.
Towards that end, DOL is stepping up its enforcement efforts in the wage and hour division and at OSHA. Spriggs, an economics professor, told audience members that the Department of Labor sees its role in the recovery as “not just getting jobs back, but trying to get back our middle class.”
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack stressed the importance and resilience of rural counties during his luncheon address at the Legislative Conference.
“People talk about the recession, but the rural communities have been dealing with conditions like this for years,” he said.
Despite rural America’s experience dealing with difficult economic circumstances, Vilsack said the current loose confederation of small towns would likely not survive. “Many small communities won’t be able to tackle this alone,” he said. “They must combine forces to create a vibrant economy.”
He advocated any program that encourages a regional approach to rural planning.
The Agriculture Department will address rural issues through a variety of programs, including expanding broadband access, optimizing bio-fuel energy production and food supply capacities, and expanding ecosystem markets and natural habitats.
The challenges rural Americans face tempers them into a resource for the county as a whole. “The value system of the country is at stake, more than jobs, poverty rates and income levels,” he said. “We undervalue farmers and ranchers, when if we paid them for the work they did, they’d get contracts like professional athletes.”
Monday, March 8, 2010
(Washington, D.C.) NACo's Board of Directors adopted new policy positions at their meeting this morning. They range in content from policy opposing online travel agencies' attempts to bypass collecting and remitting local government hotel room taxes to support for post-secondary educational opportunities for alien minors. The board also heard from White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Munoz, who credited counties with helping to form frameworks for administrative policy initiatives and asked for their continuing input in the areas of immigration policy and energy efficiency program grants.
The opening general session is slated for later this afternoon with speeches from U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Time magazine columnist Joe Klein.
Conference workshop sessions kicked off today, as well. Following are summaries of some of the day's educational sessions.
•Sustainable Communities Resources: Incentive Grants for Regional Planning and Development Projects
The U.S. departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Environmental Protection Agency are offering a number of resources to foster sustainable community planning and development. They have formed a Partnership for Sustainable Communities that seeks to integrate policy on housing, transportation, water infrastructure, and land use planning and investment.
One of the speakers, Stephen Cerny of HUD’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, explained a HUD planning grant program that will provide $100 million for “regional visioning” efforts. “This is an opportunity for your counties to come together and initiate a regional visioning process, if you haven’t already,” he said. For areas that have already undertaken such efforts, grants will be available to enhance their plans.
For counties that want a say in the program’s structure, HUD is seeking public input. Comments are due soon — by midnight Friday, March 12. Information is available at www.hud.gov/sustainability > In Focus > Advance Notice and Requests for Comments – Sustainable Communities Grant Program.
•Our Nation’s Changing Health System: Impact on Rural Counties
Representatives from executive and legislative branches and a nonprofit stressed that bringing more primary care physicians to rural areas will improve healthcare in these areas.
The problem, Health Resources and Services Administration Administrator Mary Wakefield said, is the higher compensation available to medical specialists, which attract doctors eager to pay off medical school debt.
National Health Service Corps offers $50,000 in debt relief to doctors who commit to working in rural communities for two years and $150,000 for a five-year commitment. “With an average med school graduate carrying $150,000 of debt, this puts rural communities on even ground with larger urban areas,” Wakefield said. More than 2,000 doctors have entered the National Health Service Corps, she said.
Jocelyn Richgels, associate director for national policy programs at the Rural Policy Research Institute, said that though recruitment was a problem in supplying doctors to rural communities, the children who grow up in those communities are more likely to return there after college, if jobs exist for them.
Opening General Session
Joe Klein, columnist, Time magazine
Time magazine columnist Joe Klein offered his diagnosis of what ails Washington in the current era of Congressional gridlock and “hyper-partisanship.” Handicapping the odds of Republicans picking up seats in midterm elections, he said of Washington, “No matter what happens in this election, the city will still be broken.”
Conventional wisdom has the party in power, the Democrats, losing seats. Klein said historically the president’s party has lost control of Congress if his approval rating is 50 percent or less. In recent polling, President Obama’s favorable ratings have hovered around 50 percent, plus or minus.
Klein looked at government dysfunction through the prism of the health care reform debate, in which each side has dug in its heels. Why try to reform health care when 80 percent of Americans are happy with what they have? He cited two arguments in favor — one economic, one moral: to remain competitive with countries that guarantee or subsidize health care, and the “short-term moral problem” that at least 30 million Americans have no health care, and a large percentage fear losing what they have.
U.S. Rep Gerry Connolly (R-Va.)
U.S. Rep Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) addressed his former colleagues in county government during the opening general session.
The former 14-year Fairfax County supervisor, now in his first congressional term, extolled the virtues of local government, along with the frustrations of working with legislators who are unfamiliar with how local government works.
“We have a mission to communicate clearly between different levels of government because not everyone has experience in a level of government when things have to get done,” he said, stressing that county commissioners and supervisors were often on the front line of the ire and complaints about other governments’ jurisdictions.
Specifically, he opposed a U.S. Senate proposal to tax municipal bonds, a change that would add costs to most debt-financed government improvement projects.
Connolly has introduced H.R. 3332, the Restore the Partnership Act of 2009, a bill to establish the National Commission on Intergovernmental Relations to facilitate cooperation between all levels of government.
Connolly praised the recovery act’s part in staving off teacher layoffs and opposed a change to a competitive grant system for funding schools, rather than the current formula-driven allocation process. He said the national economy was poised for recovery, but doubted it would be swift, and decried the crumbling transportation infrastructure and eroding transportation funding mechanisms.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
(Washington, D.C.) Full policy steering committee discussions begin today on proposed NACo positions. At least 30 separate proposals have been submitted for consideration. Also on tap for Sunday is a Town Hall Meeting on national drug policy.
Prior to their debating the proposals, the steering committees are being briefed by administration, congressional and other policy experts. Today the Transportation Steering Committee heard from Federal Highway Administrator Victor Mendez. Mendez defended the job-creating outcome of the Recovery Act: "The evidence is clear that the Recovery Act is a big success."
He urged steering committee members to be ready with their transportation projects in anticipation of a second round of stimulus spending. "We really don't know what's going to happen with a second stimulus bill. My message: Be ready to go with your projects."
He also reported on his initiative at the highway administration, Every Day Counts. Its goals are to: 1) Make the agency 'greener' in its operations; 2) Cut project delivery time in half. It's currently estimated , Mendez said, to take 12 years–13 years to deliver a major highway project. "That's way too long," he commented; and 3) Find ways to get promising technology into the field faster.
Agriculture Under Secretary Dallas Tonsager spoke to members of the Agriculture and Rural Affairs committee about the USDA’s strategies to build up rural America. Strategies include building new businesses, continually encouraging rural communities to grow and expanding broadband communications into rural communities.
A former South Dakota dairy farmer, Tonsager stressed the importance of local food systems and touched on alternative energy, such as bio-fuel, where he believes rural America can play a pivotal role.
Tonsager also spoke about the USDA’s business and industry guaranteed loan program, offering assistance to budding rural companies.
“We want to see rural America evolve and thrive economically,” he said. “To gain and grow throughout the country using resources we can provide.”
Wendell E. Primus, Ph.D., a senior budget and health policy advisor to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told NACo’s Health Steering Committee, “We have never been closer in the history since World War II to enacting health care reform.”
He added that containing costs is one of the key goals in the process of reconciling the Senate and House bills. “In terms of the changes that we’re making to the Senate health bill, the primary ones are going to be to increase affordability for the middle class.”
He said critics of using reconciliation to pass health reform forget that the process has been used 22 times before — including to enact the George W. Bush-administration’s tax cuts, and welfare reform under President Clinton.
Primus’ message to counties: “We think reducing uncompensated care will help your county budgets… I think the point I want to stress is that we need you supporting reform.”
Climate change is causing forest fire season to last as long as one month longer, USDA Forest Chief Tom Tidwell told the Steering Committee on Public Lands.
The effect, which Tidwell attributed to snow melting earlier and leaving trees drier earlier in the year, underscored the need to restore public lands to a more adaptive state. That state would make them more resilient not only to fires, but to drought, disease and invasive species. He stressed taking an all-lands approach to land management.
“Knowing the conditions and knowing what is going on in adjacent land is crucial,” he said. “Pest, fires and invasives don’t recognize property lines.”
Partnership for Rural America Campaign Manager Marc Kelley stressed that delegates should not be aggressive in lobbying legislators to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, but rather thank them for their support in the past.
“It’s too early discuss reauthorization, and doing so now would do more harm than good,” Kelley said. “Just bring them success stories.”
He said the National Forest Counties and School Coalition had found a strong ally in Parent Teacher Associations, particularly in the south.
And finally ...
Office of National Drug Control Policy representative Christine Leonard addressed concerns of Coloradans struggling with a medical marijuana policy in flux and county representatives concerned with reducing recidivism at a town hall-style meeting.
She said the Obama administration would release its national drug control policy in a few weeks, but gave several previews as to what it would include. Despite Attorney General Eric Holder’s position that the Justice Department would no longer raid medical marijuana clubs in states allowing its use, Leonard said the policy would not advocate legalizing marijuana. The administration will also not take a position on the taxation of legal medical marijuana on a local level.
“Criminal justice issues in Washington, D.C. tend to be very polarized,” she said. “It’s made into a partisan issue — being hard or soft on crime, but there needs to be complex problem solving, given the issues at stake.”
Drug control policy will focus on prevention, enforcement of driving under the influence of illegal drugs and prescription drug abuse, with emphasis on treatment in alternative or conjunction with incarceration.
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