Dal Harper brings two decades of government relations expertise to Carmen Group serving clients on a wide variety of issue areas and government relations matters. Dal represents clients before Congress, the District of Columbia, and various federal agencies including: the Department of Commerce, the Department of Interior, the Department of Transportation, the General Services Administration (GSA), and the National Park Service.
As Executive Managing Director, Dal manages teams of non-partisan government affairs professionals to execute legislative and executive branch initiatives. Dal has particular expertise in government leasing, infrastructure authorizations and appropriations, international trade matters, telecommunications, federal grants, procurement, and targeted efforts to ensure projects are approved by federal and local decision makers.
Dal has a strong understanding of the political climate and proven success in helping clients develop their projects to secure federal and local regulatory approvals and legislative accommodations. While lobbying is Carmen Group’s core business, Dal’s clients have increasingly come to expect and require strategic planning and positioning of their interests before government officials.
Dal’s diverse client base includes real estate developers that compete for federal government leases and seek federal infrastructure funding. Dal works with property owners in negotiating with GSA on lease offers and obtaining congressional prospectus approvals. Locally, Dal works with developers to authorize Tax Increment Financing (TIFs), real property tax abatements and other DC Council approvals for important mixed use projects.
In addition, Dal assisted a Fortune 500 telecommunications infrastructure provider in establishing a process to install small cell wireless antennas on city-owned streetlights in the right-of-way. He was also successful in winning a public private partnership to convert streetlights to LED technology and secured local and federal approvals for digital sign displays.
For The Wharf project, a 3 million square foot mixed use development which comprises of 24 acres of land and 50 acres of water on the Potomac River, Dal led the effort to approve a stand-alone Act of Congress (P.L. 112-143) that transferred federal land and property rights to enable the project and secured a $198 million TIF which is the largest TIF package in DC history. Dal worked for over a decade to obtain various local and federal approvals and enhancements for The Wharf.
Dal worked with the House of Representatives and the Senate to approve the first change to the District of Columbia’s Height Act of 1910 (P.L. 113-103). That change increased overall density in land locked DC without increasing the overall building heights thus expanding the District’s potential tax base by millions of dollars annually.
Dal has helped clients secure multi-million dollar contract awards, hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for highway, transit, flood protection and water resources projects, and drafted and won a $750,000 National Park Service grant for the Washington National Cathedral – the first and only federal dollars in the Cathedral’s history.
A graduate of the University of Kentucky with a degree in International Economics, Dal completed the University’s Global Studies program and studied in Costa Rica as a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholar. Dal is married, has three children and a dog named Blue.