White House Community Leaders Briefing: A South Dakotan’s View

Last updated on 2011.07.27

or, How I Spent the Hottest Day of the Summer in Washington, D.C.

Last Friday, I was here:

...almost. Dakota Rural Action sent me to Washington, D.C., to represent its views at the sixth of a series of White House Community Leaders Briefings hosted by the Office of Public Engagement. We leaders got engaged just across the street at the White House Conference Center and at this impressive edifice next door to the West Wing:

...the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

The morning began with smaller-group sessions with officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Small Business Administration, Department of Education, Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency. left to my own devices, I might have found it Buridianly impossible to pick. Fortunately, my DRA friends were able to decide that our interests fit best with the energy and environment briefing. I attended that session with about 30 other folks from around the country.

Robert Fee from DoE opened the meeting with a quick overview of his department's priorities:

1. transportation and electric vehicles
2. energy efficiency (same as DRA!)
3. renewable energy (that's DRA, too!)
4. smart grid
5. innovative research

On that last point, Fee spoke specifically of ARPA-E, our "Apollo Project" for speeding up energy innovation. Fee noted that ARPA-E funds all sorts of small projects with the expectation that most won't launch. That may sound like waste, but DoE recognizes that's how real research works: you get creative, you try all sorts of stuff (think Edison and thousands of different light bulb filaments), and find that one successful widget that gets the job done.

Then DoE's Fee took a lot of questions and comments. Among the ideas suggested by my fellow citizens:

• a battery exchange infrastructure for electric cars (this from a lady from Nevada, where one charge on current cars won't get you across the state)
• cars that run on compressed air (Fee sounded surprised; Popular Mechanics sounds skeptical)
• the Pickens Plan (though other folks at the meeting don't like fracking!)
• better battery and recycling policies, which DoE's Fee says the federal government (the nation's largest consumer of electronics) is implementing... but a gal from South Carolina points out that strict e-waste policies take away equipment available to non-profits that refurbish old computers and give them away to low-income folks... oh! the complexity of good policy!
• more environmental literacy programs
• tidal turbines and kinetic strips (?!?) to produce electricity in Detroit and elsewhere
• updating public utility commission rules to promote renewables
• speeding up smart meter deployment... though a couple of my fellow citizens met that suggestion with concerns about privacy (reasonable) and about the cumulative signal voltage from smart meters tasing the guy at the end of the block (umm... this from a lady who argued that electricity is poisoning us all and later claimed that she has invented an artificial nerve that cured her son's brain cancer—I'm trying to Google this for some confirmation).

Notice that in that morning session, there wasn't a lot of talk about rural-specific problems, other than perhaps the battery exchange idea, which might make electric cars more viable out here in open country.

The afternoon session brought all 150 attendees together in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower building. Here, too, I felt rural issues were underrepresented... but hey! I just heard on NPR (and Mr. Kurtz just linked me this article) that rural America now makes up just 16% of the American population. Step out of South Dakota and into a meeting in D.C., and you have to expect to be a minority.

I did get a chance to take the floor and tell Jon Carson, director of the Office of Public Engagement, about renewable energy and energy efficiency projects right here on the prairie. I told him South Dakota has the backyard innovators President Obama talked about in his March 30 speech on energy policy. We have farmers installing their own solar and wind equipment. We've got the town of Colton using stimulus dollars to make its municipal buildings energy-independent (there was some laughter when I mentioned the size of Colton, from urban folks surprised that small places still exist). We can find the energy solutions we need in our backyard, I said, and our energy backyard need not include the tar sands oil in Canada's back yard.

(Think about it: tar sands oil. The oil has sand in it. What effect do you think high-pressure sand will have on a steel pipe?)

I got to say my piece during Mr. Carson's listening session, as did a whole whack of my fellow Americans. On this hot summer day, as Congress and the White House continued to play debt-ceiling chicken, what were citizens worried about?

• (Wyoming) fracking in the Bridger-Teton (Carson acknowledged that, due to natural-gas mining, Wyoming has water that can catch fire)
• (Savannah, GA) better childcare so moms can go to school and get jobs
• action to help migrant workers (and Carson says part of that is the DREAM Act)
• (Reno, NV) protecting the social safety net for seniors
• (Frederick, MD) the apparent lack of empathy and foresight as we shift funding from schools and HeadStart to prisons and border patrol
• (Minnesota) flat-funding of TRIO and the proliferation of for-profit "schools" that prey on the poor
• (Las Vegas) reforming the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
• (Columbus, OH) plain old despair causing folks to give up on the job hunt
• (Oakland, CA): getting tech into Title I students' hands, boosting student athletics, and countering what the speaker referred to as a "spiritual Don't Ask Don't Tell" that keeps people from speaking freely about their faith at school and work (at least one secular humanist withheld his applause, wanting to know more just what the speaker had in mind... then drew relief on another front when Carson mentioned the administration's focus on arts education)
• (Washington, DC) equity in funding across rich and poor school districts (yes!)
• (Dallas, TX) after-school programs
• (Nevada) HIV/AIDS prevention
• (Pennsylvania) the huge number of murders committed with illegal guns and the need for gun control (to which Carson, a Wisconsin native who grew up hunting, calmly responded that while the vast majority of Americans support "common sense gun laws," the small minority on the other side is vastly more organized. Still no sign of just when Barack Obama is supposed to be coming for our guns.)

If these laundry lists of problems and policies set your head spinning, you see one of the challenges of public engagement at the national level. If you invite 150 people to the White House, you have some obligation to let as many of them speak as possible. That means these folks, including me, are going to use their 60 seconds of floor time to pitch their one big priority to the Administration honchos in the room. Add then the time those honchos need to pitch their messages to us, and we don't have a lot of time to follow up previous comments, ask questions, or (heavens forfend!) talk as a group to reach consensus and craft practical solutions.

But that's a different kind of meeting (memo to White House OPE: Open Space Technology). The White House Community Leaders Briefings are good for what they are: lots of us get to brief the White House on what matters in our neck of the woods, the White House gets to brief us directly... but we all have to speak pretty briefly.

At a meeting like this, one can still make those deeper conversations happen between sessions. I had a chance to visit with our anti-fracking neighbor from Wyoming and ask her about the environmental damage and the political challenges of fighting Big Energy in a state dependent on an extraction economy. I got to ask the gal from D.C. some questions about the challenges of funding schools fairly in our nation's capital.

And then there was my five- or six-block conversation with the Teamster from Vegas who says Keystone XL will be great for union jobs. But that's a whole 'nother blog post....