A Stranger in a Strange Land MY TRIP TO D.C. WITH METRO’S CAP-TO-CAP
Publisher’s Note: In the May 2018 edition of Inside Publications, the article that ran in this column space had substantial editorial changes made that were not approved by the writer. We regret the oversight. The full unedited article, which focused on the tragic death of Stephon Clark and the aftermath in our city, will appear in a special online-only edition. This edition will also feature an update from Craig Powell on the conflicting autopsies and their political impact, and an article that details the viewpoint of a police officer in the shooting. Please visit insidepublications.com.
CP By Craig Powell Inside City Hall
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made the decision to be part of Sacramento Metro Chamber’s annual Cap-to-Cap lobbying trip to Washington, D.C. (aka “the swamp”), with a great deal of hesitation and not a small amount of trepidation. This year, 365 attendees descended on Washington to lobby the federal government to—let’s be frank about it—fork over more federal taxpayer largesse to our region. It’s a wellorganized, highly choreographed, long-standing five-day beg-a-thon, now in its 48th year. Who attends? A lot of local elected officials and senior bureaucrats, trade association executives, reps from large health care systems and nonprofits, government contractors and professional lobbyists, as well as a small contingent of local media people (Jeff vonKaenel, publisher of Sacramento News & Review, a TV crew from Fox 40 and me). Why my hesitation and trepidation, you might ask? Because I wasn’t going on Cap-to-Cap just to cover it for you, my dear readers (although
that was certainly an added benefit). I was going primarily to advocate for policy positions that aren’t exactly aligned with those of the Metro Chamber and the Cap-to-Cap delegation as a whole. You see, Metro Chamber has fallen into, in my view, the habit of supporting almost every proposal that involves Washington sending ever larger sums of federal taxpayer money into our region.
POLICY DIFFERENCES The problem, as I see it, is that that’s not always a good thing, and the dollars that Metro Chamber wants the federal government to send us could, in many cases, be better spent on more deserving projects and programs or in more intelligent, less costly ways. But the powers that be in the Metro Chamber and the Cap-toCap delegation are motivated, by and large, by short-term considerations: to land this new grant or to secure funding for that new project. It’s a beg-a-thon, after all. (Although in
fairness, the Metro Chamber had another important initiative it was pursuing with gusto on Cap-to-Cap this year: to streamline the federal approval process for projects of all kinds.) No one with Metro Chamber, to my knowledge, is suggesting the one solution that would save mountains of taxpayer money while giving state and local governments total control over how such dollars are spent: simply roll up the budgets of dozens of federal departments and agencies and “block grant” the entire pile to the states whence the money came. Eliminate the federal haircut that Washington always extracts when it serves as the middleman between federal taxpayers and local projects and programs. Eliminate the ways in which the federal government’s grant and project guidelines coerce local and state governments into spending their own money (in the form of required local matches) in ways they might not otherwise.