Mark Your Calendars For March And April

by Jim Mathews, President & CEO

A lot of emails have come my way asking about dates for the Spring Council meeting in Washington, D.C., and my short answer is: probably sometime in late April, but we’re still working on a venue.

That’s because our multi-year contract with the Alexandria hotel property across the street from the King Street Metro is finished, and that’s a good opening for us to look for ways to respond to some of the concerns many members have shared with us about everything from the location to the costs to participate.

Bottom line is that there will be a Spring Council Business Meeting, and if you’re looking to block out dates I’d block out the last week of April to attend because that’s when Congress will return to Washington. However, I would not -- just yet -- make nonrefundable bookings, either for travel or places to stay.

But as all of you reading this know, we have a new House, a new Senate, and a new Administration coming to town next month. Our advocacy will take on new urgency, and our strategy for telling the story of passenger rail and how it can bring prosperity to every corner of our country is going to have to adjust.

That’s why we’ve decided to dramatically expand the idea of Day on the Hill, hosting two weeks’ worth of workshops for our members, donors, and supporters at our DC offices and conducting four separate rounds of visits with congressional delegations over that two-week span.

These workshops and their Hill visits will take place during the last week of March and the first week of April and will be centered on specific regions of the country so that issues of local concern will get the attention they truly deserve.

We can’t afford to wait until April to make our first appearance on Capitol Hill, and we can’t just rely on Council members alone to carry our grassroots messages to members of Congress – including the 60 or so new legislators who will take their seats for the first time.

So, our plan for 2025 is to have a Spring Council meeting in D.C., likely in the fourth week of April, a Fall Council meeting somewhere else in the country chosen and produced by the Council, and to supplement these meetings with two solid weeks of intensive workshops and Hill visits.

Those workshops are going to be an important kick-off to our new advocacy strategy, and we’re opening registration now to get started. I hope I can count on you to take part.

When I arrived as CEO a decade ago, the Day On The Hill visits had evolved into a Council-only activity, but they were never intended to be exclusively a Council activity. Through habit and convention, that's what they had become and it’s something I have really tried to change during the past ten years.

These workshops are for anyone who really wants to do Day On The Hill and do it right, whether you’re an elected Council member, a rank-and-file member, or even a non-member who supports us and passenger rail. During an intensive two-day session, you’ll learn from our team, do deep dives into local/regional issues with other members from your region, and then do visits with your congressional members that are focused and targeted on issues closest to you.

We think they're going to be much more serious, thoughtful, and effective meetings than what we've done up to now. And by conducting multiple workshops and multiple rounds of Hill visits, we hope to demonstrate a much bigger and more sustained presence by our grassroots in the halls of Congress...just being visible, and present more often, will really resonate among congressional staffs.

Here are the dates for the workshops, by region:

March 24th & 25th = Northeast and Mid-Atlantic
March 26th & 27th = Southeast, Southern and South Central
March 31st & April 1st = Midwest
April 2nd & April 3rd = Northwest, Southwest and Mountains/Plains

REGISTER HERE

Obviously, anyone is free to attend any one of the two-day workshops, each of which will include a Hill visit, BUT we’ve designed it so that each region gets its own focused day (either Monday or Wednesday) and its own set of congressional appointments (either Tuesday or Thursday). We would expect you to choose the region in which you are most interested, and attend that two-day session. Which days you would attend would depend on which region you choose for your participation. In other words, choose a two-day session to attend.

Between our office’s workshop space and the conference center in our building, we can absorb as many as 50 attendees for each session, but we will have to cap attendance at 50 per regional session. Registration costs will be significantly lower than prior years because there’s no hotel food-and-beverage minimum or conference space rental for us to cover, and if a traditional hotel – with its traditional costs – is tough to fit in your budget, you’ll have the freedom to make your own arrangements in a way that suits you best.

“So, what does this mean for the Spring Council meeting, Jim?”

One of the biggest concerns I’ve heard from Council members is that there isn’t enough time to build relationships with Council colleagues, to debate and discuss customer-service and policy issues, and to conduct Council business. And I’ve also observed – and our meeting records confirm this – that many Council members aren’t making Hill visits at all when they travel to D.C. for the Spring meeting.

With this step, I’m trying to give more time back to the Council for its own business, and by decoupling the Council meeting and the Hill visits, we’ll create more space for Council business to take place, devoting an entire day to Council debate, discussion, and speakers rather than just a few hours shoehorned into the last morning of the conference.

Yes, you’re reading that correctly: Council business will take place for a full eight-hour day, in person. Council members are smart, engaged, and knowledgeable and they want and deserve more time together and more space to engage with the rail policy questions we all want to address. Once we finalize a venue, Council will be the first to know so that you can make plans. My hope is that those plans will cost Council members less because they’ll be able to choose their own hotels or Air BnB arrangements, and in any case a one-day meeting will demand fewer overnights than the traditional three- or four-day meeting.

At the same time, as has been our practice since the pandemic, Council members will also have the option to participate in the Business Meeting and fulfill their Council responsibilities via Zoom at no cost.

Among many members the impression (always incorrect, but impossible to kill) has always been that Hill visits were only for Council members, and that the meetings themselves were really only a Council function. Now they're two entirely different events. Come to one, come to the other, or come to both. You can choose how to attend, where to stay, and how to participate.

I’ve been saying for several years now that our strength is in our grassroots voices, and I’ve heard from many of you that you want to find better and more meaningful ways to get involved and in ways that you can afford. We think these workshops will help to do that, while turbocharging our presence on Capitol Hill at a crucial time to defend all the gains we have made in the past six years. This is no time to stay on the sidelines, and I hope to see you at one of our workshops in D.C.!