Republicans are moving in

Inside the empty Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, crews are getting the facility ready for the Minnesota Wild and another NHL hockey season.

Republican organizers are on hand too, getting familiar with the place where they'll nominate a presidential candidate next year. So far, they like what they see.

"What we're seeing here is probably one of the most state-of-the-art facilities in the country, the Xcel Energy Center," acknowledged Matt Burns, the spokesman for the Republican National Convention's Committee on Arrangements.

Burns says the RNC will essentially take over the Xcel Energy Center six weeks before the September 1 start of the four-day convention. In the meantime, Burns says the people in charge of staging the convention have started taking measurements and considering their options.

"Do we have the stage at the far end? If you're looking at a hockey arena, do you do it at a far end and do kind of a long shot and pack people around it? Or do you put in somewhere in the middle, like where the neutral zone of center ice would be of a hockey arena that we're looking at here, and put the staging there and kind of build out from there?" he said. Burns is among 15 RNC employees now working full-time in St. Paul. Republicans will eventually fill the 40,000 square feet of space they're renting in a Lowertown office building with 150 employees and countless volunteers.

It takes a big commitment to work on a national convention. Jan McBride, the committee's director of financial services, is working on her third. McBride lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But she left her home and her soon-to-be husband, to work in St. Paul for a year.

"It is exciting," she said. "It's like throwing a giant party, and you work and work and work all year, and then it's over all of a sudden, and you feel kind of let down. And I think that makes you want to come back and do it again, because you always feel like you can do it better every time you do it. Every one is different. Every city is different. And I guess I must really enjoy it, because I keep coming back."

On the same floor of the same office building, Republican activists from Minnesota are also working on convention preparations. They're lining up party venues, lodging and transportation for a long list of convention attendees. The event is expected to draw 45,000 people, including delegates, media representatives and other guests.

Douglas Leatherdale, chairman of the Minneapolis-St. Paul 2008 Host Committee, compares the effort to a country preparing for the Olympics.

"You build the venues and you build the tracks and all the athletic facilities, then you turn them over to the athletes and the officials. That's essentially what we do," he said.

But Leatherdale's biggest job is raising about $60 million in private money to help cover costs of the convention. Leatherdale is the retired chairman and CEO of the St. Paul Companies. He's also led several large fundraising efforts for the Minnesota Orchestra and the University of Minnesota. Leatherdale won't say how much money has been raised so far, but he says the committee is running a little ahead of its target.

"It's important to recognize this is money that's not just coming from the local community but it's coming from the national community as well; people who have an interest in the event or who are part of it in some fashion or the other," he said. "It's a very wide variety of sources. But I must say the local business community is typically very generous in these things, and they're not failing us here now."

Leatherdale says his pitch to potential donors stresses the convention's economic impact, which is projected at more than $150 million. He also talks about the expected national and worldwide media coverage.

Leatherdale says that visibility will bring additional benefits to the area for years to come.

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