Fixing Schools and Rubbing Elbows

Apparently I missed a lot of drama at the office on Friday. I was actually kind of glad. I had received several emails and phone calls on Friday and throughout the weekend. Thankfully, the opera was too all consuming for me that I just ignored my cell all weekend long. A wise decision, I think.

Monday was definitely interesting, but everyone at work is taking the situation in strides, and the boss is in good spirits. Things also started to pick up with meetings and such. I’m sure that has to do with the fact that appropriations are due by the end of this month, and organizations are making their last ditch attempts to lobby for funds.

Here’s a great story on how we deal with our constituents and what we do for them. We have a large Native American population in our district. It’s a pretty poor area, and the Congressman has worked hard to bring them much needed funding. There are quite a few schools out on the reservation that probably should have been demolished decades ago. Some of them are fortunate enough to be on the Bureau of Indian Affair’s (BIA) list of schools to receive funds for complete overhauls. This one school in particular was supposed to receive funding back in ’06 and begin construction on a new school. However, due to budget cuts, it was postponed, but BIA has assured that they will get it in the ’09 budget.

So a group from the Native American school wanted to meet with us and BIA to discuss their concerns regarding how long the process is taking. From my understanding, this meeting was three months in the making. The group from the NA school scheduled and rescheduled several times, even in the district so they wouldn’t have to travel to DC. But our scheduler finally got a time they could agree on, and BIA signed on to the meeting as well, which I learned, BIA can be quite the slow moving agency.

The NA group was scheduled to be in our office at 3 to meet with the Congressman. BIA was scheduled to join in at 3:30. Congress ended up having votes that afternoon, so the 3:00 meeting would just be cancelled and the member would meet with everyone when he got back from votes…in a perfect world. BIA showed up at 3:20. The NA’s were a no show. Our scheduler tried calling several times to no avail. The member shows up at around 3:40-ish, talks to BIA and apologizes profusely. BIA leaves around 3:45. The NA’s come waltzing through the door at 3:50. Of course we have to be the diplomats, so we apologized for sending BIA back home because we couldn’t just make them sit there not knowing when they’d show up. The leader of the group, Katherine, tried talking her way out of it by saying that she had talked to our scheduler and they agreed on 3:30 and not 3:00. To which our scheduler said that it was now 20 minutes past 3:30 and they were late regardless.

So we met with the NA group, and they had a ton of questions for us. But the BIA really would have been the best resource for giving them answers, and since they were late, BIA went home and we couldn’t give them answers. Now we have to try and schedule a conference call with BIA and the NA group. I don’t think this will be an easy task for us considering our history with the two groups. But I’m learning a ton of random stuff about Native American policy and all that other jazz.

After work, I went with my buddy Torrey to an Arizona State Society event that hosted people from the three major Arizona Universities that were prominent in the bioscience field. We talked to the new vice president of biosciences at NAU. It was good to talk to someone from Flagstaff after being here in DC for a month. Going to this event made me realize that I have a lot to learn about the art of schmoozing. Thank God Torrey is a pro! The event was small, but good. Can’t complain about free wine and good hors d’oeuvres. We also ran into a guy that Torrey knew who worked in Flake’s office for a while. All in all, a good event.