We're coming to you again today from NCSL’s Legislative Summit in Boston where the organization is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Today's guests are 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. They will both assume their new positions on Wednesday at the NCSL Business Meeting.
We're coming to you again today from NCSL’s Legislative Summit in Boston where the organization is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
Today's guests are 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. They will both assume their new positions on Wednesday at the NCSL Business Meeting.
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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 again today from NCSL’s Legislative Summit in Boston where the organization is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Today I’m 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. They will both assume their new positions on Wednesday at the NCSL business meeting.
Tomorrow I will sit down with two international visitors to get their perspective on the summit and why working with state lawmakers is important to their nations. You can also check out Monday’s podcast from the summit where I sat down with Utah Senator Wayne Harper, the current president of NCSL, and John Snyder of Kentucky, the current NCSL staff chair.
Here is our discussion starting with Representative Evans.
Representative Evans, nice to have you on the podcast.
ME: Awe it is a pleasure.
Ed: Let me start by asking you about your experience with NCSL and why you thought it would be important to get into a leadership position.
ME: It’s important to join any organization, any church, any group and give it your all. If I’m going to be you know in anything, I want to give them my all. So, I joined my legislative body in Illinois and I’m giving them all. I’m assistant majority leader. I’m chairing a committee. I’m just involved in policy creation helping folks. And I’m going to give NCSL you know you might as well reach for the top and look to connect people so that’s kind of what got me in the NCSL leadership.
Ed: Bipartisanship is not in vogue at the moment to put it mildly, I think. And I think that’s a real challenge for organizations like NCSL. And I wonder if maybe you see it as an opportunity as well as a challenge because with so few people out there really holding the bipartisanship banner, I wonder if you think that this is a way to try to find more common ground between Republicans and Democrats.
ME: Those who look to sell or push decisiveness, that’s their mission. They have a job to do you know. I think it’s important for us to not succumb to their job, right. The opposition. The enemy. Everyone has a mission you know, and I think the mission for a legislator is to connect to folk. Every legislator represents all types of people. You don’t know who’s in your district. You know Democrats represent Republicans. You represent different people of ethnicities, orientation so just focusing on what brings us together and that’s what we do at NCSL right. I can think of five things, Ed, that you and me can argue about. I can think of 500 things that we agree on. So NCSL says why don’t we just focus on the 500 things, right. And this is what we do here. You know massively divisive policies, we don’t discuss them here at NCSL cause there’s no need. But can we talk about transportation. Can we talk about education funding. Can we talk about health care. Can we talk about military services, how we value our veterans you know. Can we talk about taxation and the proper structures to collect the dollars. You may not want to collect as much as my state. You still got to collect some. What’s the proper amount to do that. I can go and on and there is so much that can bring us together. We focus on those things here.
Ed: One of the roles of NCSL is to advocate for states in Washington. Without getting into a whole bunch of discussion about what the situation is in Washington right now, I just wonder if you think a bipartisan organization is maybe in a good position to try to go to the federal government in whatever capacity that is to talk to them about things that would benefit all states.
ME: I think that first you know I think the federal government like any other human being, they want to be respected. We have a president in President Trump. We have administration, you know. As long as we are communicating to them respectfully and focusing on the issues, I think we will be received and that’s what we want to do because we are all one country. The more we focus on the things that bring us together, the better. We are a constituency of the federal government. We are citizens of the country so we definitely should organize and communicate. Advocacy is important. I want to hear from my constituents, and we are constituents so we should organize particularly we constituents with a particular type of expertise, right. We understand state government. At the very least, we are familiar with it. So, we should gather together, and you know communicate to our federal leaders that hey we see it a certain way and hopefully they will be receptive.
Ed: I wonder if you have a particular area you want to focus on during your presidency that you will be taking over later this week at NCSL?
ME: In this country, I think we definitely should be talking more about infrastructure and how we continue to improve the infrastructure of the United States of America. Better roads. Repair our bridges. You know ensure that our drinking water pipes are replaced and free from lead. Something that can unify us, you know, which is definitely infrastructure. You know infrastructure creates jobs. Infrastructure creates safety. There are so many things that infrastructure focuses on so if I could just pick one subject, that’s the infrastructure. Let’s build more in America.
Ed: You are going to be talking to a lot of legislators in the next year traveling around as the President of NCSL and I wonder if there’s a particular message you are going to want to share with them.
ME: If you are a legislator, let’s strengthen the legislative bodies of America cause we all have families somewhere. If you are a Republican, you got some family in Chicago as deep blue Democrat, Detroit and LA, right. We want every place to be a good place, you know. We may not agree with the direction. I have family members. I don’t agree with everything that they are doing, but I still want the best for them. So, any opportunity we can find the best for because you can disagree but still have some commonality. And let’s celebrate those things because we don’t need to hate. You can dislike. You can disagree. I think that’s the process. And that’s what we want to invoke here that as long as we know we want to get to the same place, which is a good place for the citizens, you may have a better way, I may have a better way. Well let’s focus in on those commonalities and I think that’s what we are missing here because those who stoke and fan the flames divisiveness have a mission. They have to find something. But luckily with us, we don’t have to look far. It’s so many commonalities if we just focus on those commonalities, we will be fine.
Ed: Representative, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and thank you so much for your service to NCSL.
ME: Thank you, Ed. I appreciate it.
Ed: I’ll be right back after this short break with Lonnie Edgar from Mississippi.
TM: 07:19
Lonnie, great to have you on the show.
LE: Thank you so much for having me, Ed.
Ed: So, Lonnie, you will be taking over the staff chair this week and I wonder if you could talk about why you first got involved in NCSL and why you wanted to work in this leadership position?
LE: I first got involved back with NCSL in 2009 regarding some health focus areas. And so, I was very interested in the organization to see how it could strengthen our office, strengthen the information that we provide to the legislature as a hold and just really network and connect with many of my colleagues across the country.
Ed: So, you are an analyst. The director of a group of evaluators. I wonder how you will bring that skill to this role.
LE: One of the things I would really like to focus on during my term as staff chair is really taking my abilities as an analyst and seeing how to really reach out and engage the broadest number of staff possible and really efficiently utilize the resources and the networking connections that I’ve established through both NCSL and many of my other colleagues across the country.
Ed: So, Lonnie, we are here discussing the 50th anniversary of NCSL at this summit in Boston. And staff growth was considerable in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, but it kind of plateaued by the time we got to the 2000s and the issues are not getting any simpler. I wonder if you think that legislatures have the resources that they need in terms of staff to do some of these very complex jobs that they are asked to do.
LE: I definitely think that it is important to keep staff engaged and to keep staff active as far as serving their legislatures in each of those states. It has been a little bit of a challenge as the years have ebbed and flowed in terms of the resources available. I think state legislatures in each respective state has their own unique challenges and I think each state does the best they can to keep staff engaged and involved and supported and to keep the job of the legislature serving the people as a whole going forward. There have definitely been some moments where I feel like we could use a little extra support in some areas, but I think that legislature in its entirety have done a really good job trying to leverage the resources that are available because it is all about efficient and effective use of state dollars, especially for my office in Mississippi.
Ed: Now Lonnie, I know you’ve been a runner and an athlete. As a former obsessive marathon runner, let me ask you do you take any lessons from sports when you go around the country and you talk with your colleagues around the country. Is there anything you take from sports that helps you talk to them about how they do their jobs and how they approach it.
LE: I’m really excited you asked that question, Ed. Fitness was something I got into much later in life. Running has really become something that I just enjoy doing. I kind of tell people and laugh all the time that all you have to do is have a good pair of shoes and you can just take off and go. But as I’ve trained for endurance runs and things over the last few years, I really resonate with that as far as how it transfers over to the legislative environment because oftentimes things are moving quickly. Things change rapidly, but really especially on the legislative staff side of things you really are focusing on that endurance. You are focusing on keeping that legislative institutional knowledge going you know throughout the different terms; throughout the different administrations and things of that nature so it really is kind of like being in that marathon. It’s all about pacing yourself. Taking advantage. Making sure you have the things you need to finish the race. Making sure you have the information you need to serve the legislatures providing them with the best tools possible and providing yourself with the most resources possible which is one of the things I really value most about NCSL is how it really sets up both legislatures and staff to be successful over the long term.
Ed: So, you’ve been involved with NCSL for a long time, and I wonder if there are specific things you want to focus on in this next year.
LE What I would really like to focus on over my next year of staff chair is really about revitalizing just the energy and the excitement and how to propel the current buzz about celebrating NCSL’s 50th year and celebrating its success, but making sure you keep an eye towards the future on how to propagate that success and just keep that energy and level of excitement moving forward with staff. There’s a lot of opportunities to better train staff, better network with staff, include a lot of leadership level staff and things of that nature. Some populations who may not have been as actively engaged with NCSL in the past, I would like to make a focus to kind of bring everybody to the table. For example, with the Boston Summit people were asking me what I was most excited about and all I could say was I get to see almost 9,000 of my closest friends. I very much view the summit as kind of a big legislative staff family reunion and a lot of the connections and the information you learn at these meetings are just invaluable and how to share that information and share that wealth with others is really what I want to focus on.
Ed: Well Lonnie, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and thank you for taking the role of staff chair. Take care.
LE: Thank you so much for having me, Ed, and I look forward to seeing all of y’all at the summit and in future meetings ahead.
Ed: I’ve been talking with Illinois Representative Marcus Evans, Jr. and Lonnie Edgar of Mississippi about their new leadership roles 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.