-: Hi, my name is John Russell.
I'm the Senior Director of Government Relations
and Chief Lobbyist with the American Society of Appraisers.
The federal government wanted
to make appraisers fiduciaries.
An appraiser is someone who was paid to give
and objective unbiased third-party,
I have no interest stake in the transaction,
opinion of what something is worth.
And in this case it was for shares in a company
that would be owned by its employees,
an employee stock ownership plan transaction.
So we engaged very early in that process.
It was with the Department of Labor
explaining why this created an untenable position,
an untenable tension between what was being asked
and what was going to happen.
That process took nearly five years to resolve itself.
The first thing that you'll do with any proposal,
especially regulatory rule making,
is you'll sit down with the text of the proposal.
You'll read through it.
You'll reach out to those within your organization
who you know can understand the proposal,
can digest it quickly, can provide really good feedback,
let you know is it something that's beneficial,
something that's harmful?
Are there aspects to it that are problematic
that need to be addressed?
Ways that you could possibly address it.
Once you sort of get through that part
and you establish okay, what are my positions,
or what are our positions as an organization,
and how are going to express those positions?
And it's important to get in front of whatever
entity has proposed the regulatory rule making.
So in the prior example, the Department of Labor,
but whatever government agency it may be,
and to sit down with them and get a sense
of what they're trying to accomplish.
And then there's a lot of putting out press releases,
writing about the issue, communicating out to your own,
in my case I represent nearly 5,000 professional appraisers,
so how you communicate the issue to them,
why it's important, why we're spending the time on it,
why it's important that we continue to follow through on it.
So obviously having very strong writing skills is important
in that context as well and making sure
that you can make the case internally as to why
we're putting the resources into fighting a certain
proposal and why it's something that's of import
and critical to deal with in that situation.
And then just paying attention to what's going on
with things like tax reform, other things moving
through Congress that can impact the appraisal profession.
You pay attention to a bunch of legislation.
95% of it never gets passed, right.
So you sit here and twiddle your thumbs,
and there's very, as much as we'd like to think,
we as lobbyists have a lot of sway over outcomes
at the end of the day, when only 5% of anything moves
how much influence do you have in the first place
as to what moves in a bicameral legislature
with 535 different sets of opinions and interests?
So just making sure that you're plugged in
to what's going on up on Capital Hill, also critical.
Never really a dull moment.
Never really a down period.
Some of that owes to the day job
and some of that owes to the things
that pop up on an as needed basis.