On the ground

The Sidney Democratic Committee met last night in the Board Room at the Civic Center and first on the agenda was Richard Rich, one of three very strong Democratic candidates for Supreme Court Justice in the 6th Judicial District of New York.

Rich generously spent time discussing not only his own candidacy but that of all three Democrats on the ticket. A spirited question and answer session followed, and the conversation ranged from the various sorts of cases usually heard by the State Supreme Court to constitutional questions about the Bush Administration’s detention and torture of foreign nationals on foreign soil.

Following Mr. Rich’s presentation, the meeting continued with a recap of last month’s County Committee reorganization meeting, and voter outreach and candidate recruitment in Sidney. As a first step, the committee started planning a pre-holiday party in mid-November for Sidney Democrats (probably to be held at the Sidney Memorial Library).

We also made plans to start a rotating schedule to attend and monitor Town Board meetings to stay on top of what is happening with town government (particularly since the local press is strangely silent on the subject), and to work on filling the four remaining vacant seats on the Committee.

In all, a longer-than-average but very successful meeting.

The next meeting of the Sidney Committee will be held on November 14th at 7 p.m. in the Board Room of the Sidney Civic Center.

Sidney and Masonville held their monthly joint committee meeting this week and got quite a lot done.

We’re still talking about outreach to get our local Democrats kicking and to bring a full slate of candidates to give Sidney voters a bit more in the way of choice come November. In Sidney, there are three seats on the Town Board up for election, including Town Supervisor, and we’d like to field candidates for all those spots.

We’re working up a mailing to town Democrats, too, and hope to have a monthly newsletter up and running for them very soon.

We’re also putting together our energy presentation. We’ve found likely presenters on wind, solar and even hydro, along with a willing hand at the library to help us with location and logistics.

We do good work, if I do say so myself. But, then, we’re Democrats. What else would you expect?

There was a joint meeting of the Sidney and Masonville town committees last week at the Civic Center in Sidney to continue our discussions of growing the Democratic party in this part of Delaware County. The meeting was co-chaired by Dawn Rivers Baker (Sidney chair) and Ruth van Putten (Masonville chair).

We’re developing a two-pronged outreach strategy here. First, we plan to use voter lists to reach out to local Democrats, collect email addresses and start publishing a monthly newsletter to keep them up to date on our activities. We’re also making plans to host public events such as a showing of Bought and Sold (film on voting machine issues) and a series of discussion on various options to bring locally owned renewable energy to the area. Committee members are to keep their ears to the ground to see what other issues are on the minds of our neighbors here in Sidney.

We also discussed upcoming local elections and reviewed some of the prominent local Democrats who can be approached about running. We have several potential candidates we can approach for the various office that will be up for grabs later this year. We will also continue to develop the resources we can make available to support our local candidates.

The next Sidney/Masonville meeting is scheduled for April 11, 2007.

The Sidney Town Committee met last week to make plans for using the momentum of the last election to make the Democratic Party more visible and more active here in Sidney.

We want to get more of our local registered Democrats involved, so we’ll be using the lists we have from our phone banking to stay in touch. We’re also going to work to fill all the seats on our Town Committee and, we hope, get some younger people involved.

Another thing we talked about was putting together a few public events around the issue of town-owned alternative energy. We hope to have three events: one each to discuss the feasibility of wind, solar and hydro-electric power.

(After last year’s flooding, we’re all agreed that we certainly have enough water with enough power to light all our houses here in Sidney!)

We’ll follow up those events with others that touch on other issues of importance to our neighbors here in Sidney. Our hope is that, as the Committee becomes more active, it will be easier to get folks involved because there will be something for them to be involved with.

We’re also discussing recruiting candidates for upcoming local elections this year. All in all, we haven’t lost a bit of our enthusiasm here in Sidney since November. Onward and upward!

From an article in today’s New York Times entitled “In House, New Class Arrives for Lessons in Lawmaking”:

At a party at a local bar on Monday night that one new staff member described as “sweaty,” current Democratic House members instructed new ones about the pecking order for the incoming class. At the top are the “dragon slayers,” the Democrats who took down especially big Republican targets like John E. Sweeney in New York, Richard W. Pombo in California and Curt Weldon in Pennsylvania. (emphais mine)

Nice to know our new Congresswoman arrives on Capitol Hill with a bit of clout!