Looking ahead to a bright future.

• Author: Chiles, Christopher D.
• Position: President's page

MY YEAR AS PRESIDENT of NDAA has truly flown by, both in terms of time and number of trips on airplanes. When you read this, I will have only about three more months remaining as your president. Many positive things have been accomplished these past nine months and there are many reasons for my belief that the future of NDAA is indeed very bright.

Perhaps topping the list of significant accomplishments is again being able to pay to bring faculty and students to the courses offered at the NAC. This was made possible through the hard work of the staff in both Alexandria and Columbia, the prosecutor coordinators of all the states and the thousands of committed people who took the time to write letters, sign letters, make phone calls, and meet with their congressional delegation about this extremely important issue. Without your efforts, it would not have happened. Now we must continue the fight and redouble our efforts to secure the necessary funding to continue being able to offer the best training available in America for prosecutors at no cost to the prosecutors' offices across the country.

As important, for the first time we have funding appropriated for student loan forgiveness for prosecutors through the John R. Justice Act--money budgeted as a line item and not as a carve-out of some grant monies. This is truly historical and it is so exciting to be able to say that we anticipate being able to begin providing funds for loan forgiveness before the end of the summer. There are still details to be worked out, and we recognize that there is by no means enough money budgeted to meet the very real needs of our hard working assistants in reducing their loan amounts, but it is an historic first step. Again, this happened due to the hard work of literally thousands of prosecutors and others, and the continuous support and efforts of Senator Durbin. If we continue our efforts to increase the budgeted amount to necessary levels, there is every reason to believe that loan forgiveness will continue for years to come.

I am also very excited about the summer conference that will be held in Napa Valley, California, this July. Barbara LaWall, prosecuting attorney in Pima County, Arizona, and a long-time member of the NDAA Board of Directors, is the chair of our summer conference committee. She and the rest of her committee have put together what may well be the best agenda for a summer conference in NDAA history. Another NDAA Board member, Gary...