 Mitchell was also a founder of, and the first Chairman of the Northeast/Midwest Coalition in the U.S. House of Representatives, and was a founding member of the Congressional Tourism Caucus.Among his other accomplishments as a Member of Congress, he was responsible for establishing Leatherstocking Country, a nine-county tourism district in Central New York state, and played a key role in the House in establishing Fort Stanwix National Monument as a unit of the National Park System.He and a coalition of other House members also started a campaign in the early 1970s to persuade the Defense Department to award more military contracts and employ more people in the Northeast, which was losing Defense funding and contracts to the South.