Exciting New Tool

Over the past couple of days, I have been pleased to be among the first people in the area to be made aware of an exciting new tool for communicating with our legislators in Olympia. The ever resourceful Chad Lupkes (DFW, Vice-Chair State Progressive Caucus) has now written about his newest creation over at Washblog:

"You know how you can use MoveOn or Working Assets to write letters to congress, and the reply from staff comes back to you? They've spent a lot of time building tools for us to use at the grassroots level that does most of the work for us." He continues, "Have you ever wanted to write a letter to all members of the Government Operations & Elections committee in the Olympia Senate, but all you could find is one email at a time that you had to laboriously add to the To: line in an email? Annyoing, isn't it?" Well Chad has created a tool for us to patch that hole in the communiations loop.

Currently hosted at the 46th LD, PDWC, and DFW websites is a form that will allow you to select any State Senate Committee, identify the members, and create and send your own message to any one or combination of senators on that committee. And now, if you look to the links on the sidebar of this Blog you will find that same tool listed as "State Senate Committee Contact Form". Simply "right click" on the link, select "open in new window" and you are ready to send off a letter to a committee of your choosing. So let's begin...

It happens that there is a need to contact the Senate Government Operations and Elections Committee to request they bring the senate version of the "comprehensive" bill (on Public Financing of Campaigns) up for a hearing. In this case, we want to send an email to the Chair and Vice-Chair of the committee (Sen. Fairley and Sen. Oemig) and ask them to bring SB5510 before the committee for a public hearing. For more information on the bill, please refer to this post.

After you have sent you emails to the Chair and Vice-Chair, you might want to send an email to the other members of the committee to let them know that you are a supporter of this bill and hope to see it pass during this session of the legislature. Even though most of these members will not be in your district, because they are sitting on a committee they realize that they will be hearing from a statewide audience.

Whether you use this tool today or not, I appreciate the efforts of Chad Lupkes to bring us something like this for our use. Thanks Chad!

Peace,
Chad Shue
Vice-chair, Democracy for Snohomish County