Chief Lobbyist and Senior Director of Government Relations, The American Society of Appraisers

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.