(TNS) In a summer of rising tensions among U.S. states deeply divided over the rights of women, voters and gun owners, 19 of the nation's governors have gathered in Maine to find common ground on less divisive issues, such as advancing computer science education in public schools and assisting the post-pandemic recovery of the tourism industry.
Gov. Janet Mills welcomed her counterparts to Portland for the semi-annual meeting of the National Governors Association, a nonpartisan entity representing the chief executives of the fifty-five states, territories, and commonwealths, with a pitch to bridge partisan divisions.
"(Mainers) are people of all political parties, bound by the shared belief that their government should work for them," Mills said. "That belief is in our blood, bred by generations of Maine leaders like Margret Chase Smith, Edmund S. Muskie, Bill Cohen, George Mitchell, and Olympia Snowe, people who believed in putting their country before their political party."
Speaking to reporters after the first plenary, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said the bipartisan forum was valuable. "We're a group that has the shared experience in terms of leading and there are opportunities for bipartisan cooperation," the Republican said. "Some of the national issues affect us differently, but all of us have similar challenges even if we have different dynamics in terms of our legislatures and local politics. But it's great comparing notes."
Outgoing NGA Chair Asa Hutchinson, Republican governor of Arkansas, announced that fifty of the 55 states, territorial and commonwealth governors had signed a compact he has been promoting committing to expand computer science education in public schools. The pledge, endorsed by Mills, commits the governors to implement at least one of thirteen policy initiatives meant to increase the number and demographic diversity of students studying computer science.
New Hampshire-based inventor Dean Kamen, whose engineering powerhouse DEKA is pioneering the rapid production of human organs grown from a patient's own cells, urged governors to boost the supply of young people interested in science and technical fields by contributing to his ongoing effort to make robotics competitions into a sport as popular as scholastic football, basketball or baseball.
Kamen's observation, back in the late 1980s, was that the emerging shortage of science, technology and engineering experts was a cultural problem: schools and their students didn't celebrate STEM, they celebrated sports. "We know a model that works sports. Let's create a sport around science and engineering," he recalled to the governors.
The result was FIRST, a robotics competition for K-12 students that's grown from 23 teams in 1989 to some 50,000 teams fielding more than 700,000 student competitors in 113 countries. Maine alone has 633 teams. Backed by donations from tech giants, the nonprofit has dozens of employees and $70 million in assets.
He wants the governors' help including Mills to further expand the model and increase its profile in an effort to give the sport soccer-like visibility. Students who become passionate about STEM, he reasons, will transform their own prospects and that of the country.
"I'd say, Gov. Mills, you're a tiny state, and I bet you don't have 100 high schools, and if you put a line in your budget that said we're going to have a FIRST team in every high school," Kamen told the Press Herald. "And I want every other governor to say: no, I want to be the first one to claim that victory."
The CEO of computer chip giant Intel, Pat Gelsinger, repeatedly urged the assembled governors to press their states' congressional delegation to pass the core provisions of the CHIPS Act: $52 billion in incentives for firms like Intel to shift semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States. Gelsinger, who has been lobbying for action on the long-stalled bill for months, implied chipmakers would invest in overseas manufacturing instead if Congress didn't act before the August recess.
"Call your senators we need this done before the August recess," Gelsinger said. "I and others will make decisions ... to decide if meaningful portions (of future manufacturing) will be on American soil or not."
While the tourism sector officials including a representative of the U.S. Travel Association encouraged governors to help fund marketing efforts, Mills and two other New England governors Republicans Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts noted the enormous problem of tourism workforce housing, which has been exacerbated by the spread of short-term rentals via outlets like VRBO and Airbnb.
"This seems to be a major impediment to securing the workforce for the industry," Mills said.
Baker said his government had started building worker housing on Cape Cod because short-term rentals had "sucked up all the housing" there. Sununu related how, as a resort operator in the Waterville Valley of New Hampshire in 2016, he had been forced to buy another hotel just to house his workers. This prompted Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, to observe that the country was absurdly "turning houses into hotels and hotels into housing."
Earlier Thursday the governors held a closed-door session with officials from the Defense Department and Federal Emergency Management Agency to foster more federal-state cooperation in dealing with wildfires and droughts, Cox said in a tweet.
At lunch also closed to the media L.L. Bean CEO Steve Smith spoke to the governors "about the health benefits of outdoor recreation," according to a tweet by the NGA.
The governors convene again Friday, July 15, to appoint new officers and to discuss boosting early childhood literacy (virtually) with Dolly Parton, who created a nonprofit around this issue.
(c)2022 the Portland Press Herald (Portland, Maine) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Continued here:
Governors Try to Find Common Ground in a Divided America - Governing
- U of A Gets $700K to Improve Wireless COVID Sensor - Arkansas Business Online - September 25th, 2022
- Graduate Theses and Dissertations - University of Arkansas - June 4th, 2022
- These Okra Health Benefits Will Make You Rethink This Summer Veggie - msnNOW - August 18th, 2021
- New NSF Grant Awarded to Hendrix Biology Professor Duina - Hendrix College Events and News - August 14th, 2020
- Deacon Butch King learns to accept the 'gift' of cancer - Arkansas Catholic - December 13th, 2019
- Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapy Program ... - September 16th, 2019
- Stem Cell Therapy in Little Rock - Chiropractor Little Rock AR - May 3rd, 2019
- Top 15 Anatomy News For 2017 - Bio Explorer - March 11th, 2019
- OrthoArkansas - January 29th, 2019
- Stem Cell Therapy in Arkansas | Arkansas Heart Hospital - October 1st, 2018
- Stem Cell Injections | Arkansas Surgical Hospital - October 15th, 2017
- 'There is no contradiction to being a vegan and eating GMO foods' - Genetic Literacy Project - August 23rd, 2017
- Unusual treatment for acne scars uses your own plasma - THV 11 - August 5th, 2017
- Devin Guillory - Jackson Free Press - June 22nd, 2017
- Woman growing second skeleton, and it's locking her inside her own body - Arkansas News - May 6th, 2017
- Non-Opioid Pain Medicine Options Could Save Lives - Story - KNWA - April 14th, 2017
- Governor Signs "Emerging Therapies Act of 2017" With Strongside ... - Yahoo Finance - April 13th, 2017
- Six U of A Students or Alumni Selected as NSF Graduate Research ... - University of Arkansas Newswire - April 13th, 2017
- Three universities research spinach to bioengineer cell tissues - Indiana Gazette - April 12th, 2017
- Human heart tissue grown from spinach The Johns Hopkins News ... - Johns Hopkins News-Letter - April 6th, 2017
- Beating Human Heart Tissue Grown on Spinach | Worldhealth.net ... - Anti Aging News - April 5th, 2017
- Happening Today: Tornadoes, Kushner, Gorsuch, Brain Cells, Bob Dylan, Doris Day - NBC New York - April 5th, 2017
- Plants studied as tissue substitute - Arkansas Online - April 3rd, 2017
- Can a beating heart tissue grow on a spinach leaf? Yes, and WPI did it. - The Boston Globe - April 1st, 2017
- Beating Human Heart Tissue Grown on Spinach - Anti Aging News - April 1st, 2017
- Team Grows Heart Tissue on Spinach Leaves - Laboratory Equipment - March 25th, 2017
- Will Trump stick with TrumpCare? - Fox News - March 9th, 2017
- From Bovines to the Battlefield: New Bone Regeneration Technology Has Wide-ranging Benefits - Laboratory Equipment - March 7th, 2017
- New bone regeneration technology has wide-ranging ... - Newswise - Newswise (press release) - March 7th, 2017
- Human cloning - Wikipedia - March 4th, 2017
- POLL: Bill seeks to allow Arkansas doctors to refuse care over 'conscience' concerns - Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette - March 1st, 2017
- Stem cell registry drive at SAU Feb. 14-15 - SAU - February 11th, 2017
- AR Stem Cell Therapy | Regenerative Medicine - December 30th, 2016
- Stem cell laws - Wikipedia - November 25th, 2016
- Coverage Policy - Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield - September 7th, 2016
- Welcome to Pallone Veterinary Hospital in Rose Bud, Arkansas - October 9th, 2015
- Stem cell laws - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - October 1st, 2015
- Mesenchymal stem cell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - October 1st, 2015
- Human Embryonic Stem Cell Market Share, Growth, Trends ... - August 2nd, 2015
- Stem Cell Therapy to Redefine Regenerative Medicine, says ... - August 1st, 2015
- Cancer Stem Cells Drug Pipeline Update 2015 - KAIT ... - July 2nd, 2015
- Stem Cell Stock Review Updates Coverage On Accurexa - KATV ... - June 13th, 2015
- Stem Cell Banking Market in India 2015-2019 - KAIT ... - June 10th, 2015
- Asymmetrex Will Discuss the Importance of Adult Tissue ... - June 1st, 2015
- 3. Repairing the Nervous System with Stem Cells [Stem Cell ... - April 29th, 2015
- Stem cell transplantation for articular cartilage repair ... - April 18th, 2015
- Reality TV show, cancer patient come to Omaha for transplant - April 8th, 2015
- Derick Dillards Mom Cathy Gets Treatment To Keep Cancer At Bay, While Jill Suffers Morning Sickness - March 5th, 2015
- Autologous Stem Cell Transplant | eHow - December 28th, 2014
- Global Stem Cells Group Announces Plans to Hold Four ... - November 12th, 2014
- What are adult stem cells? [Stem Cell Information] - August 23rd, 2014
- The Case for Adult Stem Cell Research - 21st Century Home Page - August 23rd, 2014
- Stem Cell Transplantation - UAMS Medical Center - Arkansas ... - August 21st, 2014
- Arkansas (Stem Cell) - what-when-how - August 21st, 2014
- Little Rock AR Resources - Stem Cells: Get Facts on Uses ... - August 21st, 2014