Hundreds head to D.C. to push capital agenda
Chamber of Commerce will urge clean-energy expansion, health care, flood control funding.
By David Whitney - Bee Washington Bureau
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, April 22, 2007
Story appeared in METRO section, Page B1
WASHINGTON -- It starts with a party and ends with a gala dinner featuring political humorist Jimmy Tingle. But in between the Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce will send more than 400 citizen lobbyists Monday and Tuesday to pound the pavement on a host of regional issues.
"This is our Super Bowl of advocacy," said John Lambeth, the chamber's board chairman, in a telephone interview.
This year's Capitol-to-Capitol lobbying fest will circulate position papers on 80 issues, but will emphasize four priorities.
Chief among them is continuing federal funding for flood control work in the Sacramento region and transportation projects.
But this year the chamber also will be championing the region's nomination for a Labor Department grant, through its Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development Initiative, to promote expansion of clean-energy technology.
"We have over 60 companies in the clean energy field in the Sacramento area," said Michael Faust, the chamber's senior vice president of public policy who has organized the trip. "We are becoming the clean-energy hotspot of the world."
Faust said the chamber also will ask Congress to continue funding the State Children's Insurance Program by boosting funding by $60 billion. The program expires in September, and if it's not extended, as many as 24,000 low-income children in the Sacramento area could lose health insurance, Faust said.
"This is a first for us," he said. "We've never carried a health care issue back to the Capitol before."
The three-day trip to Washington has grown to become the largest such chamber event in the country. The chamber crowd this year, which Lambeth said will include 73 elected officials "from every county and most cities in the region," were scheduled to fly out of Sacramento on Saturday on four commercial flights and take over half of the 657-room Renaissance Mayflower Hotel.
On Monday, the group spreads out over Capitol Hill and the headquarters of the federal bureaucracy, where Faust said there are more than 250 separate meetings scheduled.
Each member on the trip -- or their business -- pays their own way. The per-person rate this year was $2,855, $545 more for those not wanting to share a room.
Even with that high cost, Faust said they had a waiting list just three weeks after the trip was announced.
"Part of this trip is about coordination within the delegation," Lambeth said. "Nowhere else do 73 elected officials sit around and talk about regional issues and concerns."
There are 11 separate policy teams for the 2007 trip, with specialties ranging from air quality and arts and culture to health care, transportation and homeland security.
Among the issues that the groups will lobby for are a commitment of up to $200 million over 10 years from the Federal Aviation Administration for a terminal modernization program at the Sacramento International Airport; $14.7 million for a child development center at Beale Air Force Base; $20 million for a transportation center in downtown Sacramento; almost $40 million for a bus replacement and expansion program; $21 million for light-rail expansion; and $25 million for road projects.
The business end of the trip begins Monday morning with breakfast, where the featured speaker will be Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
"There is no other trip like this," Lambeth said
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