In February, I sent letters to the three Representatives whose Congressional districts include towns bordering Hanscom Field. I also sent letters to our senators, John Kerry and Scott Brown (the new guy). The letters asked for assistance with getting approval for East Coast Aero Club to take in foreign students, who constitute the best market for helicopter flight training. Though our school has been established for 25 years and has a very similar curriculum to other FAA-approved Part 141 flight schools, our application has become lost in a bureaucratic black hole. We explained that if we could get approval to bring in foreign students we could hire additional instructors and mechanics here in Massachusetts, thus growing the tax base. We figured that maybe a phone call from a Representative or Senator might cause a government worker to dig up and act on our application.
Today we got a call back from a staffer in Senator Brown’s office. She apologized for the delay, but the letter had gotten routed from Washington to Boston and disappeared in a big stack while they were getting organized. She is going to try to help us.
How about the other Massachusetts politicians, whose salaries we have been paying for decades with our tax dollars? No answer.
That’s pretty surprising. Twenty years ago it was called casework, and the larger a congresspersons’ staff, the more people they had working casework. Simple stupid stuff like getting a new stop sign posted at a certain intersection, etc. Oftentimes the hard to understand remained in office due to this; Al D’Amato is one I remember reading this about in Hedrick Smiths’ The Power Game.