A day in the life

By Judy Erickson, Government Relations Director

Did you ever wonder what a day in the life of a lobbyist is like?  There is the legislative agenda set by Parks & Trails to put into place and manage and then there are all those bills, and all those hearings to follow to keep up with what other organizations are interested in; what the DNR is working on and what legislators themselves want to do.

This aspect of lobbying is called monitoring. While a lot of effort goes into pursuing the legislative agenda; a lot of time is simply spent monitoring. If you wonder why we read through pages of bill introductions and pages of bills, here is a classic story of why you spend time monitoring.

Last week, the House and Senate began to put together their omnibus environment and natural resources budget bills. As a matter of course, I attend these hearings and read through the bills to make sure there aren’t any surprises or items of concern.

In reading through the House bill the night before the hearing, I noticed that one of the sections made changes to the designation of the Willard Munger State Trail.  I knew that the DNR was working on cleaning up their statutes so I wasn’t surprised to see the language.

But on closer reflection, it looked like they had eliminated one of the sections of the Munger trail from the statute. It looked like the way the language read the Gateway segment of the trail ended in Taylors Falls; but didn’t start again until Hinckley.

An e-mail was sent off to the DNR and copied to a legislator and the committee chair asking to double check the impact of the language. Maybe I was missing something, but wanted to be sure.

Sure enough, the next morning in committee, the DNR said yup, good catch.  A simple oral amendment was offered, a few words changed and the Munger Trail still goes all the way from downtown St. Paul to Duluth.

A day in the life.