The QBS Express

speaker-0 (00:06.05)
Welcome, listeners, to the QBS Express, the ACEC Kansas podcast. I'm your host, Executive Director, Scott Heidner.

We have a lot of things that are special about today's podcast. We're normally doing audio only, but today we have video because we're being hosted by our friends at ACEC National in DC. And don't usually have a co-host, but today our ACC Kansas president Rob Crusen has joined me, and together we're extremely excited to welcome United States Congressman from the great state of Kansas, Derek Schmidt. Congressman, thanks for being with us.

speaker-1 (00:40.111)
Thanks for having me on, Scott. Appreciate it very much.

speaker-0 (00:42.382)
Absolutely. Once upon a time the congressman had joined an ACEC Kansas podcast years ago and apparently the experience was survivable as he came back from

speaker-1 (00:53.43)
forgotten that. No, I'm kidding. I'm just kidding.

speaker-2 (00:58.994)
Well Congressman, appreciate your giving us some time tonight to talk to us. You might just most of our members I think are familiar with your background and the support you've you've shown our industry, but you might step back and give us at least the clip notes version of your your career service at the state level, even in industry, right? And you're practicing professional in the day, and so we we are kindred spirits that way, but you might touch on those things.

speaker-1 (01:14.046)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:25.532)
I was born in a log cabin somewhere on the frontier in the seventeen hundreds.

speaker-0 (01:29.134)
Ha ha ha ha.

speaker-2 (01:30.51)
Maybe that might find them.

speaker-1 (01:31.694)
Maybe not. Maybe not. Not quite that granular is that and maybe more true. Is that what you're looking at? Very good. Very good. No, we've had the chance to work together a long while. I I I came up as a staffer both in our congressional delegation and then with the governor for a while and litigated for a little bit with the state and then did a did a long run in the state senate for ten years. I think that's where we first got connected on policy issues. We were there for the

speaker-0 (01:42.814)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (02:02.464)
Transportation bill in Kansas, I think, and also the as I recall the bailout of the transportation bill with the gas tax adjustment

speaker-1 (02:16.238)
Then in 2010 I went over to the AG's office thanks to the voters. They were nice enough to let me do that, spent three terms there.

12 years and ran for governor and lost in 2022. Thought I was done, as my wife would point out, went out and got a a real job with a paycheck that actually had a little more heft to it. was practicing law for Hush Blackwell. I was a partner at Hush for for that year and a half or so and thought I was done with public service. And and then our congressman decided to call it quits somewhat abruptly, had little kids and and life just sort of caught up with him and and said, well, maybe I'm not done.

So here we are and been doing this now about a year and a half and thoroughly enjoying it.

speaker-2 (02:58.318)
Appreciate that.

speaker-0 (02:59.128)
Yeah, very good. I want to take a moment to just say thanks for a few things, and most of these are are from the past, but A, it doesn't mean we've forgotten, we still appreciate them, but B, I think just as importantly, these are policies that are going to come up again and again and again. So I think by recognizing some of your efforts in the past, also appreciating the fact that we have somebody from the delegation with a

And support these things moving forward. The first one is not a policy issue, but one of the things we're proudest of is we have an emerging leaders program, and that happens every year. We have 20 young-ish professionals, kind of mid-career. And we asked you, my gosh, a thousand years ago, it seems like, if you would come and give the government affairs program.

It is a sacrifice to do it. It's a time commitment and and it takes a little effort and you said yes and just never stopped saying yes and when

speaker-1 (04:02.156)
Yeah, you're trying to get rid of what you got. He's still going. Come on.

speaker-0 (04:07.638)
And as real No, when you switched from Senate to Attorney General, I thought for sure, well, it was a good run. And you still said yes for years and years, all the way until you came to DC. So let it not go unnoticed how much we appreciate that. your name is still comes up with all of our ELP grads. it contributed a lot to the program.

speaker-1 (04:30.904)
Well thank you. I appreciate it doing it. It was a lot of fun. And yeah, you know, in case folks don't know, Scott often plans ahead. And he would typically contact me or my office, or usually both. He would put in requests with the office and then he would see me and just mention it to me. About January to to commit to a time and day in September to come talk to the leadership group. And I think we almost always did. might not have done it in January. So we appreciated the foresight too.

speaker-0 (04:58.542)
Thank you.

speaker-1 (05:00.848)
See it was he was hoping I was gonna say no at some point, but I think we can do that.

speaker-0 (05:05.832)
Your your staff was always incredulous that we were scheduling that far ahead of time but also very accommodate. my gosh. Well on a on a policy perspective, there are two things in particular that throughout your career you've been very supportive of that are very meaningful to us. And one is infrastructure of all kinds. transportation is the most evident of that because it it takes up such a large part of the budget and it's more press.

But you've been supportive of infrastructure across the board and I know we've talked in the past when you're a child of southeast Kansas, you have a a richer

speaker-0 (05:47.502)
But it's also a district where voting for revenue is not not an easy vote either. And you always did a great job of finding ways to be supportive of infrastructure, even with the pressures you had from your constituencies about the revenue side. Again, really appreciate your commitment in that area. So it's it's it's awesome.

speaker-1 (05:51.692)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (06:11.342)
Yeah, well you kinda appreciate it. It was, you know, it is we we Kansans understand that you you've gotta invest capital today in order to have what you need tomorrow. Again, right? for lots of reasons, not to stereotype everybody in Kansas as a farmer, but we are an agricultural state and we have those roots and folks understand you gotta plant now and be patient in order to harvest later. And that that's that's true certainly in investing in infrastructure. And we still work on that a lot, even in this role. We've got a lot of communities on.

or or road projects, just did one of those in Junction City, came through. Water plants, sewage treatment plants, hospital buildings, university buildings, we we we still get it. So appreciate seeing that.

speaker-0 (06:56.974)
Well, funny you should mention Junction City. We have a we're for listeners we're out in DC. there's a series of events we have and and there's a short reception we'll go to after this. we have a couple members that I think intend to bring up Junction City and a word of thanks to you when you when you get up there. Yes, absolutely. Well the last thing lest this feel like a a gravy train of thank yous and appreciation

speaker-1 (07:22.388)
Here it comes now, here it comes. Yeah, this is it. You want to say pores? No no no, I can't even spell those.

speaker-0 (07:28.972)
Ha ha ha.

Well, as as our listeners all know, our biggest issue and the one that is the most important to us is procurement and it's the use of qualifications-based selection for design professionals. but as a licensed attorney, I know you work in a similar world where most of those arguments transpose from one profession into the other. And it's not something that comes up often and it's not often when it does, it's not often in the form of an actual statutory change.

But you have shown a great appreciation for the public policy reasoning for using QBS. and it's hard to get legislators to invest in that enough to even really know what it is. So we're appreciative of that too.

speaker-1 (08:16.502)
Appreciate it very much. I mean you want to get the best deal for taxpayers. The best deal isn't always the cheapest price. That's obviously a factor every single time, but it's not the only factor. And you know, professional services generally they're not a commodity. Right. That's true in the practice of law, it's true in the practice of engineering, it's not a commodity. And so you want qualifications, you want outcomes, you want proven abilities, you want the best possible design at the lowest possible price, not just one of those two things. And so appreciate it very much.

speaker-0 (08:44.62)
Yeah, absolutely. Well I'll I'll quit reminiscing about golden days and and things you've done in the past and let Rob ask you about the future.

speaker-2 (08:53.35)
Absolutely. Thank you, Congressman. That we might move to what's maybe on the docket for infrastructure. I mean we talk a lot about funding, sure that's important to us, but we just talked about some other things are maybe re regulations, taxations, things like that. And so anything on the near horizon that our members might be curious to hear about.

speaker-1 (09:10.796)
Well, it's always it's continual. It doesn't just it doesn't just end. especially in the regulatory world. we've spent generations building up this behemoth and we chip away at it, but you're not gonna just dismantle it and and nor perhaps do you want to just dismantle it, but you do wanna trim it wherever you can and and

It and so there's all that's a continual process. You know, I think I'm I'm pretty optimistic we still have a shot at getting a service transportation bill done this year. I I realize the days are getting thin, but there are several factors suggest maybe maybe we can still do that, and a lot of us have really pushed for that for a lot of good reasons. from the from the industry side, you know, certainly having the the certainty of

important. I mean yeah, Congress went three years overdue on the farm bill, and we now

extender out of the house. We got about 75% of it done and signed into law a year ago in the summer, tucked into the the so-called big beautiful bill or the reconciliation bill. So a lot of the big farm stuff is in there, but a lot of other parts didn't get done in there, couldn't for procedural reasons. So we still need to do the rest of the farm bill and it's three years out of date. We got it out of the house or waiting for the Senate. I say that because we want to avoid that problem in the the transportation world, service transportation world. And

To get a next service transportation reauthorization in place before the current authorization is gone and there's a gap. It's not just helpful to the industry, although it certainly is, it is helpful to the taxpayers because you can get certainty, you can get planning, folks that are going to be doing the work can sort of right-size their expectation, deployment of their assets, resources, and talents. And whenever you create risk and uncertainty, the cost goes up. And in this case, it's taxpayers who pay that bill. I'd rather spend a dollar on.

speaker-1 (11:02.138)
Roads and railroads than to spend 70 cents on that and 30 cents on you know helping the folks that do the work mitigate the risk.

speaker-2 (11:10.074)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (11:10.466)
Well said for sure. Yeah. Not everybody appreciates how much certainty in planning plays a role in what our members do in the communities they serve and maximizing the taxpayer dollar.

speaker-1 (11:22.766)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Most bank of the bucket that's the goal.

speaker-0 (11:26.35)
Absolutely. Well, let me ask you this. You and your staff have been extremely gracious in the time allotment you've given us, but we don't want to wear out our welcome, so let me maybe close with this. On a more personal level, you had so many years of service at the state level, two different roles. You've already gone through one pretty substantive transition, but I have to imagine coming to DC is probably even a more substantive transition in a lot of ways.

Share with our listeners anything that you think they'd be interested in that has changed in your life moving from the state to the federal level.

speaker-1 (12:04.608)
Well my office is twelve hundred miles from my house and that has more implications than you think about, right? You can't just run out and do things with constituents or friends in the evening because you're not there and you have to build in all the transit time and and and all the life stuff that comes with that. That's a big deal. you know, 435, which is the number of members of the US House, that is a big number of people. That is a lot of people. That's a decent-sized auditorium in a lot of our communities.

And I think I've maybe underestimated how much the sheer size of the house influences how you have to operate to be effective in the house. you know, this is a relationship business, it's a trust business, and I still will turn on the television from time to time and see a member of the House of Representatives talking and say, I have never seen that person, I don't know who it is, I've never heard their name, I don't know anything about them, and yet I work with them.

because it's just a big and and fractured place in terms of the daily schedule and because we're twelve hundred miles from home we're all gone on the weekends back home and you don't have the time you know here in Washington to sort of build those relationships. And so I that I'm still learning on that front. you have to make accommodations for those facts in order to be able to do the fundamentals which are based on relationships and trust. And we're we're making progress but that's been a a bigger transition than I expected.

speaker-0 (13:27.554)
Do you find taking an idea from conception to conclusion I know the perception is, it's the perception I have is that typically it takes longer at the federal level than the state level. Do you find that to be true?

speaker-1 (13:40.524)
Yes, it is. And especially, you know, at near the end of my time in state service. I've been around a long time. You built up the relationships and the trust. You never burn people. I mean, if I went to Republican in the legislature, even when I wasn't in the legislature and hadn't been, you know, I went as attorney general and said, This is a good idea, it's not gonna cause you any problems. This is a good idea, here are the problems it's gonna cause you. Go to the Democrats and say

I think this is a good idea. Here's why we need to do it. Here's how your folks are gonna view it to the best of my knowledge. They they knew I was gonna shoot straight with them, right? And and so you could do that and help people get in the position to assess and act quickly. It's a lot harder here. Bigger body, less opportunity to build and use that trust. It's just a slower process. And so, yes, that's certainly true. The other thing, Scott, that kind of along those lines, although at a different point.

You know, no no disrespect to the the the the coffee shop quarterbacks. we've all been there, right? Where you sit around with your buddies and your friends and you you either drink coffee or you drink something else or maybe you smoke something lawful. I know you like to do that. And glad you said that yes, and you know, you solve all the world's problems and by gosh, this is what you know, if I if I were here. I mean the reality is you're not gonna show up as a brand new member, very junior in service and

speaker-0 (14:47.702)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (15:02.83)
Be at the center of the discussions on the great issues of our time. You'll have your vote and you'll advocate on behalf of the people you represent, but you're not going to be the fulcrum that gets those 435 people lined up and moving. And if you try to be, you're gonna wind up with your name and the headlines, and people out in the country have heard of you, and nobody here trusts you because it's clearly, you know, you've you're you're building about yourself, not about trying to get something done, which is a little different from the Kansas dynamic.

But there are things you can do that on right from the start. Smaller matters, issues that are important to constituencies back home, to the district that you represent. Not the big headline issues of our time, but important issues for the district you represent. And we've we've really worked over my first year in office really to figure out which is which. Which of the things I really have the ability in this position at this time with this level of seniority.

influence and which are the issues I just have to make my position known and cast my vote on behalf of my people and move on down the road. And then we're spending more time on that first group because we can get some of those things done. We've gotten bills, we've gotten bills signed into law, we've gotten bills through both chambers signed by the president, enacted. They're not going to set the world on fire, but they do make a difference for some of the people we represent. So trying to figure out where you can actually make a difference in deploying your your asset.

speaker-0 (16:21.934)
I'll say this too, and and if you want to opine on this, please do, but we're not expecting to. One of the things that I'm not sure everybody understands, and it's more true for us at the federal level than it is at the state level, we don't call on our delegation all that often. We really don't. I mean we want support of some broad things like a surface transportation bill. We had some

speaker-0 (16:47.086)
Just flippantly use that connection. But when we do, as often as not, it's not legislation, it's regulatory. Agency stuff. And what we find excuse me, what we find is that our delegation over the years, through many iterations of the delegation, have been a tremendous asset to the state and to our industry in terms of

speaker-1 (16:57.752)
Yeah.

Okay.

speaker-0 (17:16.877)
Just create a fictional scenario, but the Department of Interior puts out a procurement for engineering services and it's asking for price. It's a violation of QBS. Something like that. Or they're proposing something like that. We can go to members of our delegation and say, hey, can you just pick up the phone and you know call somebody over there 90% of the time? It's not an intentional thing, it's some communication, but they might take your phone call faster than they would take.

And that's been a source of tremendous benefit to us over the years. And would if you have thoughts about the difference between that at the state and federal level, would certainly welcome.

speaker-1 (17:58.2)
Yeah, I think that's true. And the the the fundamentals are the same, state and federal. It's again back to the idea of relationships and also just the knowledge of who to try to reach on a given matter, which is not as simple as it sounds. I mean these are not

schoolhouse rock governments. There's a lot of nooks and crannies and a lot of agencies and departments and secretaries and assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries and legislative people and program people and it you can spend a lot of time and not make a lot of progress if you're talking to the wrong folks on the wrong matter. And so cutting through that really matters and to your point can make more of a difference in some cases than passing a law. And so that's that that's a big part of it.

And a big a big area where you know the state and the Fed differed also is the Fed's just much bigger. It is just a much bigger government. and you know in the state you can you can be about two degrees of separation from almost anybody in state government.

if you're you know, if you've been around for a while, you're a senior legislator, an office holder, somebody who, you know, works in the lobbying world, just somebody who has those relationships. You can be about I can call you and you will know the person. I will know to call you and you can call that person. Or I'll know to call you instead, you can call that person, and you can get to where you need to be. Here it's there are more degrees of separation. And I I I think

also more of a culture of using the size of the bureaucracy to sort of obfuscate responsibility. I think perhaps that's intentionally done sometimes. And so you know figuring all that out.

speaker-1 (19:44.046)
That's what you I I came up in the in the goal.

speaker-1 (19:54.078)
And it was one of Dole's great strengths, right? He had been around long enough. There were Dole staff alumni in almost every agency of the federal government. Some of them were political appointees, some of them were careerists who had burrowed in. But it was almost two degrees of separation. If Senator Dole needed to contact a decision maker on a particular RFQ or a particular regulation or whatever in the department of whatever,

There was probably a person that he or his senior people knew they could call, who in turn could connect with the right person, would know who the right person is and could connect with them. We lost a lot of that when Senator Dole retired, and you know, it's been a long time and people are gone. We had some of it with Senator Roberts. but there's a role that all of us in the delegation work to fill now that

It's a little bit of a gap, and so we all work to try to fill it. We were sort of spoiled in the dull days that way.

speaker-2 (20:51.734)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (20:52.49)
I think that's that's well said. But as you talked about those two degrees of separation or whatever, it's absolutely true. Yeah. And not something you can generate in four years or eight years. Right. But that's another conversation for another day. Well, I tell you what, you've been so generous with your time and thanks to you, the listeners can't see them, but we have some members of your team here with us that have been so helpful in putting this together. appreciate all of you and appreciate your public service to Kansas.

Most of all, I appreciate the fact that I can say QBS to you in your eyes. That makes you a great American and a great legislator.

speaker-1 (21:26.07)
Well.

speaker-2 (21:26.754)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (21:30.562)
Fashion shopping channel.

speaker-0 (21:37.134)
Half our listeners will laugh at that.

speaker-1 (21:39.758)
What?

speaker-0 (21:43.884)
No, we are grateful for your public service. Thank you for making time to be here. It's always nice to spend time with you. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Listeners, thank you for joining us for another episode of the QBS Express with our special guest, Congressman Derek Schmidt. Stay tuned and we'll see you on the next episode.

speaker-1 (21:49.954)
Thank you.