Reprinted courtesy of

2/19/04

Story by Jackie Dubbe

Photos by Paul Dols

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Rebecca Otto takes the stairs.
While others wait in groups for the elevators in the State Office Building, she takes the stairs. She’s slight in stature, and today she moves through the building at a pace that causes those who try to keep up with her to pant.
She has places to go and promises to keep.
“I have a million things to do,” says Otto, “and I try to do them all.” She is in her office, room 393 in the State Office Building, a room with white walls. The windows on one side face downtown St. Paul. The wallpaper on her computer is a photo of her son on the beach in Florida during a family vacation. A child’s desk sits against one wall. Otto’s son wanted his desk there, not just for himself, but also for the children of anyone who might be visiting her office. Paper airplanes made by Cub Scouts during an earlier visit sit on the window sill. A quilt she bought at a CommonHealth silent auction fills the wall above her desk.
One quote hangs in her office: “The ultimate moral test of any government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, our children, those in the shadows of life, our sick, our needy, and those in the twilight of life, our elderly.” -Hubert Humphrey.
Otto’s first meeting of the morning is with representatives from Century College who have come to her office seeking her support for a higher education bonding bill. Century students tell her their own stories, and she listens. Though her day’s schedule is packed, for these minutes, the students in her office are her focus.
She’s done her homework and understands the issues the students are presenting. “I’m a big supporter of K-12 and higher ed,” she assures them. “The more people we have working, the higher quality of life we'll have.” She’s concerned about the lack of nursing spots at Century. Though the school has more than 800 applicants, they’ll only be able to accept 90 of them in the fall. Century is full, full, full, the students point out.
With tuition rates up, Minnesota's community college tuition is the fourth highest in the nation. “I’m not proud of it,” Otto tells the students.
After listening to their individual stories, Otto thanks them for their visit and their comments, “Your personal stories are important for me to be able to relate when I go into committee meetings.”
But now it’s time to fly down three long flights of stairs to a committee meeting. The environmental committee is hearing a presentation on House File 327, a bill that will protect and support gun clubs. Though the bill passed out of this committee last year, it didn’t pass in the Legislature. This is a second attempt.
As representatives for the gun clubs speak, Otto listens; as the representatives for Minnesota‚s cities and counties speak, Otto listens - even though she’s heard these arguments before. While the attention of the other 26 committee members wavers, cell phones ring and papers rattle, Otto attentively listens to both sides and nods. The gun clubs want immunity and total protection. The cities contend that if the clubs are immune, the cities are liable; cities want more voice in gun club standards.
Though the bill once again passes out of committee, Otto’s is a voice in the minority voting “no.”
“It was a bad bill last year, and it’s still a bad bill,” she says. She had been hoping to hear that some changes had been made. “I’m supportive of gun clubs,” says Otto, and even commented during the hearing about what a good neighbor Wild Wings is in her district. “I want gun clubs to be good neighbors,” she says. “The bill needs more balance.” She would also like to see a real estate provision that would inform home buyers that they were moving into an area near a gun club.
As the committee meeting ends, it’s back up three flights of stairs to her office. The area around the stairs and elevators is crowded. Otto passes legislators who want to talk with her about adding her name to their bills. Rep. Jim Davnie of Minneapolis tells her he will stop by her office later.
Otto takes a moment to sit at her desk and collect her thoughts. She was up late last night working on consumer protection bills she’s authoring.
One is on lottery pools - companies that come into states and charge $5 or more for a $1 lottery ticket to put buyers in a lottery pool with 50 or more other people. “It’s legal,” says Otto, but she points out that there are currently five lawsuits against one of the pool companies in Arizona, and she’s doing research to find out what those suits are about. “If they’re operating in Minnesota,” says Otto, “I don’t want them to be able to use credit cards, I want to see some kind of oversight, and I don’t want the company to keep unclaimed prize money that should go back into the state’s general fund.”
She’s also working on a bill that would require pharmaceutical companies to pay interest on the medicare prescription drug rebates they owe the state. She’s frustrated that the companies may take months or even years to make their payments, all the while earning interest on money the state could be using or earning interest on.
Davnie knocks on her office door, comes into the office and takes a seat in front of her desk. He has two telecom bills, and he would like Otto to sign on.
One is a consumer protection bill from the attorney general’s office. Currently, it takes one phone call to sign up with a long distance carrier and two phone calls to cancel. “One call in and two calls out,” says Davnie, explaining that some consumers who are canceling service make one call, don’t realize they need to make the second call to the local provider who is doing the billing and end up paying for two services. “My bill would make it one call in and one call out,” he says. Otto listens.
Davnie’s second bill addresses a problem for small businesses that have received a phone call asking them to verify their name and address and find out a month later that there’s a $200 charge on their phone bill for advertising in some obscure yellow pages. The victim businesses try to get the charge removed, but their local provider tells them it has to be removed by the company that made the charge - even though that company is almost impossible to find. Davnie wants to protect these small businesses from being charged for something they didn’t order. Otto listens.
She agrees. She signs on.
Davnie leaves, and Otto’s phone rings. Her focus changes from tele-com concerns to the concerns of her caller who wants to know what the ATV helmet laws are.
“That’s a great question,” says Otto. Her caller, who has lost a relative in an ATV accident, would like to see helmets mandatory for anyone under age 16.
Otto commiserates, expresses her condolences, then says, “I’ll check for you and call you back and let you know.” She writes herself a note to find the information and return the phone call.
Otto’s next meeting is with three representatives of wood fiber unions and companies. They seem a bit wary as they meet for the first time with the Representative, whom they know is an environmentalist. They explain to Otto that they’ve lost 250 jobs in Cloquet and 500 jobs in Brainerd, partly because of timber cutting laws in state forests. And Otto listens. She is totally focused on their needs and their concerns, and talks with them knowledgeably about hybrid poplars, which she had considered raising at one time. She thanks them for coming and lets them know that she sincerely believes that environmentalists and the wood fiber industry can work together in searching for solutions. The environment is important; and, yes, jobs are important too.
She has another committee meeting coming up, but there are 20 free minutes to check in with her legislative assistant and grab lunch. She goes down to the second floor to talk with Kris Henry, her L.A. Because of budget cuts, legislators are sharing assistants, so these trips to the second floor are inconvenient, but do-able, and heck, it’s only one flight of stairs.
Henry fills Otto in on calls that have come in. Otto checks her “in” box. Oh, and Henry needs to know who will be coming in next Tuesday to speak to committees on behalf of bills Otto has authored. Otto will get back to her.
There are less than 15 minutes to get over to the MnDOT cafeteria to grab a sandwich, yogurt and juice to take back up the three flights to her office. But there’s only time for a fourth of the sandwich, a fourth of the bottle of juice and no yogurt - the rest of lunch is abandoned on her desk - it will have to wait until later. There’s an agriculture committee meeting to get to, and that’s back down three flights of stairs.
Today, the agriculture committee meeting is an educational presentation on bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease. Experts are presenting, and Otto, a Macalester biology graduate and University of Minnesota masters of education graduate, is within her comfort zone. Her attention is totally on the speakers. As other committee members read or watch the spectators sitting along the sides of the room, Otto focuses on the speakers and nods, almost imperceptively, but enough so that presenters begin to look to her as they speak.
And when this meeting is over, Otto will be as focused on the next concern that crosses her plate today.

Educating the public is important to Otto. “Rhetoric is so dangerous,” she says, so she’s promoting public forums, as she did with two past state finance directors at Century College on Jan. 8 that White Bear Area Chamber hosted. She also arranged for three county commissioners to speak about difficult county budget cuts at a forum at Stillwater high School. Her senior advisory committee is important to her, and there will be more public forums down the road.
The most surprising realization for Otto when she arrived at the Capitol was the political extremism she encountered. “My grandmother taught me moderation in life,” says Otto of the woman who seems to have had the biggest influence on the Representative, a person Otto still has deep admiration for.
“She was the first woman psychiatrist out of Johns Hopkins. She had high expectations for me and would say, ‘You can be anything you want to be.’” Otto’s grandmother had been Zelda Fitzgerald’s psychiatrist, and Otto is impressed that her grandmother would never discuss Fitzgerald with the media no matter how they pressed, even after Fitzgerald died. That kind of integrity means a lot to Otto.
Grandmother’s support was important to Otto, who, with her interests in science and business, feels like a “black sheep” in her artistic family. Her mother is a professional violinist who plays with the Lyric Opera Company and ballets in Chicago. Her father plays violin with the Chicago Symphony. Though Otto tried violin and piano, music wasn’t her forte. Her brother and two sisters got the artistic genes.
“My brother, Phillip, died last fall,” says Otto. He had a liver transplant two years ago, and last fall his body started rejecting the new liver. “When I knew he wasn’t going to live much longer, we invited the whole family to our home,” says Otto. “We were all with him.” She says it was an important time for the family, a time to say good-bye, a time for Phillip to sit with his nieces and nephews and tell them what he wished for them. As she talks, she can’t hide the pain on her face and in her voice.
“Fall was a very painful time,” says Otto. “We were in the midst of litigation, my brother died, and I then came down with pneumonia.”
But there’s no more time to think about that today. Otto has a million things to do, and she “will try to do them all.” And though these months when the Legislature is in session are hectic, she will be just as busy when the session ends and she spends the off-season doorknocking.
When Otto gets to your door, her focus will be on you.
No matter what your personal politics are, with Otto, everyone’s getting to have their say.
Her grandmother would be proud of her.