For today's episode, we're podcasting from NCSL’s Legislative Summit in Boston where the organization is celebrating its 50th anniversary. We're positing podcasts Aug. 4, 5 and 6 with some voices from the Summit. Today our guests are Utah Sen. Wayne Harper, the president of NCSL, and John Snyder, the Transportation Committee staff administrator for the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission and the NCSL staff chair. Tomorrow, joining us will be Illinois Rep. Marcus Evans Jr., the incoming president of NCSL, and Lonnie Edgar, deputy director for Mississippi’s Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review and the incoming NCSL staff chair. And on Wednesday, we'll sit down with two international visitors to get their perspective on the Summit and why working with state lawmakers is important for their nations.
For today's episode, we're podcasting from NCSL’s Legislative Summit in Boston where the organization is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
We're positing podcasts Aug. 4, 5 and 6 with some voices from the Summit. Today our guests are Utah Sen. Wayne Harper, the president of NCSL, and John Snyder, the Transportation Committee staff administrator for the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission and the NCSL staff chair.
Tomorrow, joining us will be Illinois Rep. Marcus Evans Jr., the incoming president of NCSL, and Lonnie Edgar, deputy director for Mississippi’s Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review and the incoming NCSL staff chair.
And on Wednesday, we'll sit down with two international visitors to get their perspective on the Summit and why working with state lawmakers is important for their nations.
Resources
Ed: Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures.I’m your host, Ed Smith.
I’m podcasting from NCSL’s Legislative Summit in Boston where the organization is celebrating its 50th anniversary. I’ll be coming to you today, tomorrow and Wednesday with some voices from the Summit.Today, I’m talking with Utah Senator Wayne Harper, the president of NCSL and John Snyder, the Transportation Committee staff administrator for the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission and the NCSL staff chair. Tomorrow, I’ll be talking with Illinois Representative Marcus Evans Jr., the incoming president of NCSL, and Lonnie Edgar, deputy director for Mississippi’s Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review and the incoming NCSL staff chair.
And on Wednesday, I’ll sit down with two international visitors to get their perspective on the Summit and why working with state lawmakers is important for their nations.
Here is our discussion starting with Senator Harper.
Senator, nice to have you on the podcast again.
WH: Thank you. It’s good to be with you again, Ed.
Ed: So, we are here in Boston for the NCSL Summit. You will soon be passing the presidency of NCSL onto Illinois Assistant Majority Leader Evans and looking back at the last year, I wonder what your biggest takeaway is.
WH: You know, Ed, it’s been my great privilege and honor to serve this organization. It’s an organization that represents all 50 states; all U.S. territories and we have a lot of international participants from different countries that are involved. This has been a great honor to go through and meet with and work with so many different people and learn about the individual needs and specialties in each one of our different jurisdictions. You know, we are all Americans. There are great things happening, but when you get down to local level some of the needs that somebody might have in West Virginia or Florida is different than California or New Mexico. They are all great states, but there are different things, different needs, different geographic features and that’s what makes this Country great because we as elected officials have the opportunity to make a difference in our states based on the needs of our individual jurisdictions.
Ed: Senator, over the last year, you’ve had the opportunity to meet and talk with a lot of new colleagues around the country. I wonder what surprised you the most from those conversations.
WH: You know one thing, I’m not sure I’d say surprised, but one thing that pleased me and really strengthened me was the fact that everybody I met with, every legislator, every individual that they brought into a meeting loved this country. They have each of us have different ways and different views to get to the same objective, but we all want to strengthen this Country. We all want to make the United States great, and we want to make sure that our constituencies are taken care of. So, the love of neighbors to me is very, was very cemented and reinforced.
Ed: You and I have talked before about the importance of listening to people. Listening to everyone as part of the legislative process. Based on your interactions with legislators around the country, do they agree with that perspective?
WH: The vast majority of everybody that I talked to, they are there to listen to their constituents. They are there to listen to each other and I think the important thing is just that we recognize the fact that we are going to have disagreements. We recognize that there’s going to be differences. There is going to be differences in budgetary priorities, but if we sit around the table and talk, we’ll come to in almost every instance common ground that we can agree on. There will always be things that we don’t, but the nice thing is that people I believe want to listen and understand.
Ed: This is of course the 50th anniversary observation for NCSL here in Boston this weekend. I wonder if you could reflect on the value of the organization to state legislatures.
WH: You know there are a lot of different demands on our legislator’s time. There are a lot of competing interests. There are a variety of organizations, and I think each organization out there that tries to support the legislative institution, they are good. But I think NCSL is the best because it’s the organization that is bipartisan, where people can come in and share ideas, can go through and say hey, we want to talk about health care. We want to talk about law enforcement. We want to talk about agriculture. And see the different perspectives from the other side. The value of this organization is just that we have so many opportunities. So many different meetings, seminars of working groups and taskforce. You can get involved in the area of the legislature that feels most passionate about and make a difference. And I think bringing people to the table and networking are the hallmarks of this organization and NCSL has done that well for the last 50 years in a wide variety of formats and forms. So, I think getting together and having NCSL offer so many different things through the year is something that really makes this organization different and makes it one where people want to come to and participate in.
Ed: I think any organization can always look to improve and I wonder as you finish up your year as president, do you have any friendly advice for how NCSL might be able to do some things better or some different things.
WH: As we talk about NCSL and its future, we have made a few changes the last couple of years to make it more financially stable. To go from being more responsive to limit the dues and dues increases and I think the best thing that NCSL can do is to build on the base it has right now and go forward and say we are going to have these additional programs. We are going to invite everybody in and make sure from the leader down to the freshman that they know that they are invited. They are welcome. And this organization needs and wants them and that NCSL I think will go through and the best thing that they could do in the future is to use the resources to support the institutions and the legislators so just build on what they have now and expand and strengthen that.
Ed: Well Senator, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and thank you for your year of service here and all the work you’ve done with NCSL. Thanks very much and take care.
WH: You are welcome. It’s been my pleasure.
Ed: I will be right back after this shortbreak with John Snyder from Kentucky.
TM: 07:46
John, great to have you on the podcast.
JS: Thank you so much, Ed. It is great to be here.
Ed: John, we are here in Boston of course for the legislative summit and in a few days, you will be handing over your responsibilities as staff chair for Lonnie Edgar from Mississippi.You’ve had a chance to talk to a lot of legislative staff around the country is this past year and I wonder what your big takeaway was.
JS: You know, Ed, just how talented and dedicated they all are. I really have mentioned to several people that one of the highlights of my year as staff chair was really last October when I was able to attend eight of the nine different professional staff associations, the professional development seminars that each one of them has every year. That was a really an insight into what clerks do and what IT folks do and what fiscal staff do. You know, I’m a bill drafter. I am with the RELACS professional development, and you know I hadn’t been to these other places to see kind of what challenges they face and what they struggle with on a day-to-day basis. It really gave me an insight into really every aspect of legislative service.
Ed: So, John, what’s the state of staff? Legislative staff in my experience are dedicated to the institution of the legislature, but these are challenging jobs, and I just wonder what the mood is in state houses these days.
JS: You are right. They really are dedicated. That’s the word that sticks out to me time and time again.They love their jobs. A lot of times … I’m very fortunate to be in a nonpartisan position. So, I’m able to love my job and hate politics and understand the politics but not buy into the politics very much. We are policy over politics most of the time. You know the IT people that help our chamber’s function, they are not worried about politics; they are worried about you know making things easier for staff and legislators and making them do their job better. It really isn’t a big partisan thing. There are certainly partisan aspects to it, and we have several great staff that work for partisan in parts and roles. But if someone looked at our jobs from the outside and said oh you must be seeped in politics and all of this kind of stuff for a lot of us that is not the case. And you know one of the things with the you mentioned the times we are in; it just seems that everything is ramped up. It seems that people are on edge. People are willing to fight at the drop of a hat and, you know, I know from personal experience. Some folks I know in Minnesota, the violence that occurred recently in Minnesota, was a very chilling thing even for the staff who, you know, get to know these legislators and become very close with these legislators.An attack on a legislator is really an attack on staff.
Ed: We had an earlier conversation, and you pointed out to me that many states have part-time legislature, but full-time staff and count on them to do the research and keep them informed.There are so many policies legislators are grappling with and many of them are extremely complex, and I wonder if staff leaders, such as yourself, feel they have the resources to meet these tasks.
JS: We’ve been able to cultivate expertise. I think as legislators, as presidents and speakers who realize the importance of staff have invested money in staff and invested time in staff. I’ve talked with my good friend John Bjornson from North Dakota, and he has gone to great lengths to help bolster the staff. North Dakota was a really, really small staff but they knew that to keep pace with the executive branch, they needed to bolster that staff and that is just one example of the state stepping up an allowing their staff to kind of get more on equal footing with the executive branch.
Ed: We also talked before about staff recruitment and retention, and you pointed out that you spent I think 30 or so years in the legislature and question whether that is really something that we will see in the future. And I wonder, have you seen promising efforts to try and bring young people into the legislature that maybe get them interested in a career there.
JS: Yeah that was something that we talked about, and it was kind of the parting thought I think in the last podcast I was on with you is that I’ve been here for 35 years. I am a dying breed. There are not folks that are going to be around that much longer and that’s not necessarily a legislative problem. It’s really the nature of what work is now. People are not used to being in one career or one position for 35 years or work for one business for 35 years. We talked a little bit back then about how the changing nature of what retirement is and what retirement systems in different states do and how when you turn that from based on what your system is whether it’s a defined benefit or defined contribution you know if you have a defined contribution, you turn it into kind of a salary game which a lot of times legislatures are going to have a hard time winning. You know I have seen that. Actually I’ve seen it in Kentucky. Our director, Jay Hartz, commissioned a salary study back in around 2000 and he was able to go to the legislators and the budget folks and convince them that you know look at this turnover. We are not competitive in these areas. We have to increase our salaries to bring in more staff and we were able to do that significantly. I mentioned North Dakota. John Bjornson has kind of done a similar thing where they’ve made their positions much more attractive to you know folks that are just coming out of college and are just entering the workforce. It used to be that RC would get outbid by other executive branch agencies. I don’t really think that’s the case anymore.That’s an improvement along the line for us.
TM: 14:43
Ed: As we close out, I wanted to ask you we are here of course observing NCSL’s 50th anniversary and I think that everybody who is part of the leadership team thinks NCSL is a great organization. But I wonder if you think NCSL is providing what staff need or if there’s other things the organization could do.
JS: There’s a part of me that thinks that if a staff were out there somewhere across the nation isn’t getting what they need from NCSL, it is kind of on them. If you go to the NCSL website without ever leaving your desk, the resources that are there for you no matter what job you have, you can become involved in your professional staff association. They do trainings online all the time to help bolster the productivity and knowledge of all of their folks. If you are a subject matter expert and need help with transportation like I do, you know calling Doug Shinkle or Ben Nasta and those folks and letting them help you find answers to questions that seem weird and odd, but they can get you an answer within two days and it is just shocking that they can give you the rundown of what 14 different states have done in this area. I just try to preach the gospel of NCSL wherever I go. I would also encourage legislative leaders when you budget money for travel, it’s great if you budget money for the staff to travel as well.If the staff doesn’t travel, it does somewhat limit what they can do with NCSL especially taking on a leadership position which is more travel dependent. And that’s why there is a big shoutout. Kentucky has always been very supportive of us when we’ve you know taken on these roles and taken on these responsibilities. But NCSL is out there for you. All of that stuff is right there at your fingertips, and I think we are well positioned to lead for another 50 years.
Ed: Well John, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and thank you for your service to NCSL. I know it’s been an interesting experience for you, and I think it was good for the organization so take care.
JS: Thank you so much, Ed. It has been a real pleasure and I’ve enjoyed it immensely so thank you very much as well.
Ed: I’ve been talking with Utah Senator Wayne Harper and John Snyder of Kentucky about their leadership at NCSL and NCSL’s 50th anniversary. Thanks for listening.
You can check out all the podcasts from the National Conference of State Legislatures by searching for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast “Our American States” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. On “Across the Aisle” host Kelley Griffin tells stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series “Building Democracy” on the history of legislatures.