What are Minnesota's cities, counties getting from lobbying in Washington?

Minnesota's longest serving member of Congress is Rep. Collin Peterson. He represents Minnesota's 7th Congressional District and was sworn in 1991.

However, Minnesota's second longest serving representative in Washington might be Barbara Rohde. Rohde is a lobbyist with long ties to both Minnesota and Washington.

"I was hired by the city of Moorhead [and] was interviewed in April of 1992," Rohde said.

Rohde worked as a congressional staffer and was former Gov. Rudy Perpich's representative in Washington D.C. for years.

"I think that if you have a mayor of a town and they have to hire a lobbyist to get funding or get support and help from a lawmaker, you either have a very ineffective mayor or a very ineffective lawmaker."

Cities and counties in Minnesota spent at least a million dollars lobbying Congress last year, even as local budgets remained tight. So what do they get in exchange for the money they spend on lobbying in Washington?

Moorhead Mayor Mark Voxland was on the City Council when the city hired Rohde nearly 20 years ago.

"We understood from the Minnesota Department of Transportation that, because we're in a rural area in Minnesota, that we probably aren't going to be real high on any of their lists of projects to get done in the near term," Voxland said. He said that's why the city had to do its own lobbying to get funding for the projects it needed.

Rohde and Moorhead started off small, securing a railroad overpass. Over the years, Rohde has brought in millions for the city, mostly in the form of now-banned Congressional earmarks.

"Roughly about $20 million over the years and that's just hard cash that we bought in," Rohde said.

That federal money has brought more railroad crossings, Interstate highway interchanges and improvements to the area's roads.

Last year, Rohde earned $140,000 for her lobbying work on behalf of Moorhead and surrounding Clay County. That works out to nearly $2.40 per resident in the sparsely populated area — the most spending on federal lobbying per capita of any community in Minnesota.

Some small communities in other parts of the country have spent much more on a per capita basis, according to a recent study by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Alaskan town of Akutan (population 1,027) spent $100,000 on federal lobbying in 2010, which equals $97.37 per resident.

Steve Ellis of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense isn't sure it's money well spent.

"The lobbyist is really some sort of intermediary, and the question is: is it superfluous or is it really worth the money?" Ellis said.

But Moorhead's Mayor Voxland said hiring a lobbyist saved his constituents — and state taxpayers — money.

"I really believe what we've done is we've helped out the Minnesota Department of Transportation by getting some of these projects done that are on their list but they're way out there," Voxland said.