[THEGrid] THEGrid Lobbying Advice

[Pinsky, Lawrence S.]

THEGridders:

         At the meeting last week I took it as an action item to 
investigate the "Lobbying" situation and advise the other members as to how 
they might proceed on their own campuses.
         Idiscovered several things.

First:  The Lt. Gov. is not really the stumbling block on the $10M 
appropriation for the Backbone infrastructure money.  The actual problem is 
that no source of funds was identified by the Legislature, so it can be 
spent, it has to exist.  The real problem is priorities for various pots of 
money, and apparently the Universities themselves are part of the problem 
in the sense that to do something now before the next Legislature meets, 
someone or some other program would have to be shortchanged by the 
necessary $10M and there is no agreement on just who or what should 
suffer.  The crux of the problem is that the funding for this should have 
come from other than the Higher Education Support funds, like for example 
the economic development monies, of which there are $100M's appropriated 
and doled out to various other special interests.  Getting those funds 
indicated would relieve us from having to take from other scarce University 
programs to buy Texas into the new high speed backbones.
         In fact, I suggest that assuming that the current diverse attempts 
to find a solution fail that we plan to push that agenda item through 
HipCAT and our local University Government Relations people for the next 
Legislative session in the coming Spring.
         The idea of a general Matching fund based on the Economic 
Development monies has apparently been broached before with no 
success.  Part of the problem has been our age-old nemisis of competition 
between the have and have-nots amongst the state universities in Texas.  By 
"have' I mean the PUF.  While the PUF might be usable for such things, the 
UT and A&M administrations are against it, and prefer to join in on an 
attempt to do it through other monies like the Economic Development 
monies.  So far so good.  But the problem has been "earmarking," in the 
sense that the majority of the past proposals were set up to protect the 
amounts of that money to benefit UT and A&M with only "crumbs" available 
for the other state institutions.  In this case, schools that are part of 
the UT or A&M system like UTA were under the tent, so to speak, but for 
example TT and UH were not, and so not surprisingly were not strong supporters.
         What we need to do is find a way to move beyond that past attitude 
(if that is possible) and try and attain our two goals of 1.) getting the 
Infrastructure monies released and 2.) setting up a truly universal 
matching fund system that any or all of us can take advantage of on a more 
or less equal basis.
         To do that, we each need to approach our local Government 
Relations people.  I suggest that the best route is to go through the VP 
for Research (or equivalent) on each campus, as that person's support is 
essential.  As a first step, you should contact the VP Research and arrange 
a meeting.  Bringing the HipCAT Lead with you is also a good idea (or at 
least have him or her a priori on-board philosophically if their personal 
attendance is not possible).  The purposes of the meeting are several 
fold.  1.) Review for them the structure of HipCAT and the role of THEGrid, 
along with our plans for a demo grid and our willingness to participate in 
support of the Government Relations efforts from each campus.  2.) Stress 
the fact that this is a grass-roots movement from the local Physics 
Departments that (hopefully) will be pretty comprehensive over all the 
Research Universities in the state.  3.) Go over our agenda in the sense of 
the stated priorities above, and try and assess the attitude of your 
administration for the mechanisms of support.  The hope is that we can 
ultimately find some common ground among them so that we can present a 
united front to the Legislature next Spring.
         Generally, I expect all of the administrations (VP Research, Gov. 
Relations,) to be supportive in principle of our goals, and sympathetic to 
our cause.  However, they will all have what they perceive as the best 
overall interests in their own institution in mind, and will be reluctant 
to give up anything else in any other area to support such an 
initiative.  That is the current state of affairs with respect to the $10M 
that the Lt. Gov. needs to know who is going to give up what to make it 
happen...  If we can find a "win-win" scenario, like using economic 
development funds to do this instead of re-directed higher education money, 
then that might be a solution.  Of course, the current recipients of the 
Economic Development "largesse" will not be happy to see us coming, either...
         Well, this message is way too long already, but it should give you 
enough to get started.  I suggest that in each case where such meetings 
take place, that you write up a short synopsis of what you learned and 
email it to the Executive Committee for coordination.

                                         Larry



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Professor Lawrence S. Pinsky, Esq.
Chairperson
Physics Department
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-5005

Attorney at Law

Tel.    +1 713 743 3552
Fax     +1 713 743 3589
Email: pinsky at uh.edu
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