PastForward (Virtual) Congressional Visits

During the recent PastForward virtual conference, the League was pleased to again lead New York’s team of advocates as we met with key members of our state’s Congressional delegation to share our enthusiasm for preservation. Although the timing of the conference – just days before the midterm elections, November 1-4 – was challenging, we held a series of productive meetings in which we thanked representatives and their staffers for their support, updated them on federal preservation issues, and requested their support for our current priorities.

It was a treat to lead this group of advocates, some of whom have participated in federal lobby days for years, and others who were meeting with Congressional staffers for the very first time. Our advocates came from around the state, and represented a wide variety of professional and volunteer roles in historic preservation: members of our team work with historic districts in large and small cities, African American churches and cemeteries, sacred places, sustainable building reuse and more. Our colleagues Cara Macri of Historic Albany Foundation and Christiana Limniatis of Preservation Buffalo Niagara were great additions to our team for our meetings with their representatives. Mike Phillips of the National Trust Community Investment Corporation joined some of our meetings as well.

As always, historic tax credits were at the top of the agenda, specifically the package of improvements known as HTC-GO. These changes to the tax code will help smaller projects, nonprofit building owners, and projects stalled by Covid and other recent challenges. New York already has eight co-sponsors in the House and one in the Senate and we hope to add to that number. If your Congressperson is not a co-sponsor yet (you can check their status here), we encourage you to ask for their support via the National Trust’s advocacy tool.

We also always advocate for the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF). As the principal federal source of preservation funding, the HPF supports a variety of grant programs as well as State and Tribal Historic Preservation Offices. After years of minimal funding, the past few years have seen significant increases to the HPF, although not nearly enough to keep up with decades’ worth of inflation since the current authorization level was set – and not enough to forestall a cut in funding to New York’s SHPO as a new apportionment formula comes into effect in FY 2024. Fortunately, for FY 2023, the Senate is proposing a higher appropriation level than the House, so we asked our representatives to support the Senate proposal, which comes closer to meeting the growing need and would also avoid a reduction in New York SHPO’s federal funding.

Finally, the National Trust is supporting several pieces of legislation to aid the protection of specific resources and resource types. The most interesting to our advocates is the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act, which will aid the identification, documentation, and protection of these important sites. The congressional staffers we met with were excited about this legislation, and we look forward to adding several co-sponsors from New York in the coming weeks. If you’d like to ask your congressperson to co-sponsor this legislation, you can call their district or D.C. office and ask that them to sign on as a co-sponsor of H.R. 6805, or contact them via Preservation Action’s advocacy tool.