What do YOU think?
Hello fellow Dems! Our June 24 Central Committee meeting offers you opportunities to make a difference in the future of your local Democratic Party.
We had scheduled a very special guest speaker - State Treasurer Tobias Read. Unfortunately, Treasurer Read, had to cancel at the last minute. We are working to reschedule his visit, but this gives us the opportunity to open up the time for what we are hoping will be a lively discussion on three fronts.
In our New Business agenda, we have three areas where your party leadership is really needing your input. At our recent Executive Committee meeting, based on what we learned during the Special District Elections, we created a new special committee for elections. This committee is in the very rudimentary stage of exploring what are our needs and developing the committee format around those needs.
Having learned during the recent election that the vote we took during a previous election to not endorse candidates in non-partisan elections created a serious bottleneck for our work electing Democrats. This non-endorsement policy must be part of the exploration and development that is done by our fledgling Elections Committee. So, I ask again, “What do YOU think?” We have been studying how other county parties deal with this question, but we need your input and engagement in this process.
The newly formed Elections Committee will take your input, possibly working it into proposals for how and who we endorse in future elections. If you check the “revised” agenda for this meeting, you’ll see that we have expanded our usual five minutes discussion time for new business items to 15 minutes for each. This should give us ample time to at lease start, what we are hoping will be a continued focus in coming weeks and months.
I’m still hoping that there will be too many ideas and suggestions to fit in this narrow time frame and that those of you who would like to share ideas on this subject, but who may not get called on in the time allowed, email you suggestions to us at TillCoDems@gmail.com.
The limited time frame for holding vital discussions on critical issues, is another area where we want to know, “What do YOU think?” In attempting to follow suggestions made at our retreat sessions earlier this year to make our meetings more interesting and engaging, your officers and committee chairs have been studying options.
As a registered political party, we have business that must be addressed by the Central Committee. However, this ‘taking care of business’ can be a little more compelling of yawns, than of vibrant discussions of issues.
As we begin to see the end of the restrictions that have forced us to meet solely via Zoom, it is a great time to look at how we can improve the quality of our meetings. Your Executive Committee has discussed the possibility of hybrid meetings, combining in-person and electronic meeting technologies. This would allow those who want to meet in person to do so, while not excluding those who find traveling to meetings an obstacle. We could also consider having meetings in different areas of our county and at different times.
But, there’s more of a question here. At previous Central Committee meetings and at our retreat this year we briefly discussed separating our “business meeting” from our meetings where we have speakers and/or forums focused on specific issues, allowing more time in the latter for questions and answers.
Finally, your party leadership has been looking at ways to engage more people in out work. We have reached out to other County Central Committees and the Democratic Party of Oregon and gotten some good ideas we want to share with you. However, we need your input on ways to attract new members and how to make our work more interesting and accessible to current and newer volunteers.
We have allotted 15 minutes for each of these discussions, but, again we are hoping we’ll run out of time before you run out of ideas. If you don’t get to speak, can’t join the meeting, or think of something in the middle of the night, please send your suggestions to TillCoDems@gmail.com.
We urge you to take this and every opportunity to let us know, “What do YOU think?”
Fred Bassett
Chair, Tillamook County Democrats