AGENDA 5
William James Eden
missed anything. If you can't make it tomorrow, let me know.
Love,
Fil
AGENDA 5:
Feedback from Valentine’s: We did well, but didn’t get a whole lot of
schools involved. Cornell got 800, Skidmore 600 (hand delivered!),
Rochester 100, and Plattsburgh 20.
Outreach Failure? Seems to be the same problem as before...implications
for lobby day?
Lobby Day:
Fil will contact EANY, Robert will contact Sweeny and Ortiz, ask when good
day is (some Tuesday in mid-April) ask if there’s a good specific bill, if
not if it would be valuable to demand 80 by 50.
We will probably demand 80 by 50 even if there is no bill.
Robert is researching which school has which assemblymen and senator.
We like the idea of a rally, depends on the number of people we have.
NYYSC Needs Support:
New York Farm Bureau-biggest lobby group in NYS, Courtney will contact them
Fil will get union support
Stephanie will work on grass-tops and church leaders?
Lobby Committee Conference Call: February 4th, 2008
Intros
Report-back from steering committee call (and what we need to do):
Anything Else?
Stephanie
Albany.
Anna, Brendan (my two main partners-in-activism at Skidmore) and I met
with Spitzer's deputy secretary of the environment on Thursday (who is
awesome and very into what we're doing) and we have a piece of
legislation to support that the Governor wants passed. Article X
(Power Plant Siting) - A8697. Its a complicated bill, but in essence
it streamlines the process for doing small scale renewable energy by
excluding coal. However, conservative forces in the Senate - namely
Skidmore's own Senator, the Maj. Leader and head of the Rules
Committee, Joe Bruno - want to include coal, which would put us in a
worse place than we started.
She also gave us the contacts for the climate coordinator for the NY
Environmental Department, who Anna is calling tomorrow, as well as an
organizer at EANY whom we emailed tonight asking for announcing
Skidmore's goal of a Bruno-focused campaign to keep Article X good and
get it passed an asking for their advice. However, when we had
mentioned NYSSC in the meeting, she thought an effective approach
would be statewide campaigns focused on adversarial Senators and
specifically Bruno - large scale letter writing and the like. Brendan
is already putting together what schools have representatives worth
targeting that should be ready by Wednesday
I think we just got the perfect lobbying campaign handed to us by
someone in Spitzer's office (which is already doing cool things all
over the place that we didn't know about) and I think we should
definitely talk about it tomorrow night.