First Posted: 3/13/2015
OTTAWA — It comes down to staying connected.
That is the driving force behind U.S. Rep. Bob Latta, R-Bowling Green, holding a one-on-one session Friday at the Putnam County Courthouse. It gave Putnam County residents the chance to bring their questions or concerns directly to their congressional representative.
“It’s really important to me because it gives everyone an opportunity to sit down and talk if they have a federal issue with the EPA or Medicare or Social Security, anything that deals with the federal government,” Latta said.
Latta is in the middle of visiting each of the 14 counties in Ohio’s 5th Congressional District, having previously visited Hancock, Van Wert, Mercer and Hardin Counties, among others. Getting back into his district and speaking with people outside of the nation’s capital helps Latta maintain perspective.
“If you work for the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., you don’t see factories,” he said. “What you see is about half the people there working for the federal government because people back here are paying their taxes that give them that job. The true smokestack, as a lot of people see it, is in the Capitol dome.”
Latta also uses information from these sessions when serving on committees or drafting legislation, drawing on concerns and experiences of people in the district.
“Let’s say people are having problems with the federal EPA,” he said. “I serve on the Energy and Commerce Committee and my one subcommittee has jurisdiction over the EPA. I never use the name of a person or a company or where it’s located, but when they’re before us in committee, I can come up with a lot better examples to give them and say, ‘This is going on in my district.’”
Latta met with 17 county residents Friday, each bringing their own concerns and perspectives with them. For Ottawa’s Doris Meyer of Ottawa, she noted that what she wanted to say to him “shouldn’t be printed in a newspaper,” she was happy to be able to meet with him.
“I was here the last time he was here, also,” she said. “He seemed like a nice guy and easy to talk to.”
Glenn Karhoff of Putnam County Parents and Teachers Against Common Core hoped to give Latta some enlightenment regarding federal Common Core legislation.
“We want to talk to him about some legislation going on right now that we hope he will vigorously be against,” he said. “We want to let him know a little bit more about what Common Core is about.”
