Lawmakers in Philly to discuss jobs, budgets
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
By: Elizabeth Fiedler
efiedler@whyy.org
It's no beach vacation, but lawmakers from across the country decided to make the trip to a conference in Philadelphia this week. More than 5,000 participants are attending the National Conference of State Legislatures summit to talk about creating green jobs, crisis leadership, spending budgets and economic recovery.
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University of Pennsylvania Political Science Professor Rogers Smith says its important for lawmakers to gather and talk shop.
Smith: There is some real exchange of policy ideas that occur amongst officials at these kinds of gatherings. It makes a difference if they're sitting down with peers from other states and hearing concretely what other governments are doing. That makes the ideas more real to them and often more exciting to them than if they just come up in a staff memo.
Some lawmakers will have to find another way to exchange ideas.
Conference Communications Director Gene Rose says lawmakers from four states including Pennsylvania stayed home from the meeting to deal with their respective state budgets.