Summer                             Waning Summer Moon

Today I went over to the Westside (St. Paul) to Neighborhood House for a meeting.  In days now long past I use to go there quite bit when Eustolio Benavides was its director.   We worked on a few projects together.  He got bounced out, I think, but nobody I talked to remembered him.

This meeting was an initial one to get the legislative agenda setting process underway for the collaborative structure, Minnesota Environmental Partnership.  The Sierra Club is a member and as the new legislative committee chair I attended.  I haven’t been in a large room filled with people like this in quite a while.  I knew only Dan Andreson, now the lobbyist for Clean Water Action and my immediate predecessor as chair of the LegCom as the Sierra Club names its legislative committee.

Since the players are new to me, the individuals new to me and the politics of the environmental organizational community still pretty opaque to me, I just sat there, took notes and listened.

The meeting finished at 4:30 p.m., putting me right in the middle of the evening rush so I drove up to Saji Ya on Grand Avenue and had some chirsahi as the highways untangled themselves.

In the old days I used to say, “Another day, another meeting.”  Now they’re a bit unusual.  I don’t dislike meetings.  A lot of folks I know profess a dislike for them, but I consider them one way of getting work done.   This one was the start of a long process.