On the ground

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!

Last night, we held our “Thank God It’s Almost Friday!” pizza party meet and greet with Susan Zimet, and a good time was had by all.

About twenty of us got together at Gavin’s Pizzeria, which isn’t enough people to make campaign organizers happy but, in a place like Sidney, it’s a pretty good crowd.

And Susan was impressive, as she always is, with her command of a range of issues. We discussed education, energy, flood relief, property taxes and more. We even spent a few minutes talking about laundry.

That’s one of the things that’s really cool about Susan — she has been in politics for a long time but she is still a very real person, who makes real connections with folks. That makes her just the kind of Senator we need in Albany, somebody who is connected with the people instead of somebody we only hear from when it’s around election time.

Our committee met in Sidney last night and, with less than 50 days until Election Day, of course our focus was on our local candidates.

There will be exciting times in Sidney, as we’re expecting meet and greet visits from both Kirsten Gillibrand and Susan Zimet in the coming weeks. Events will range from a pizza party to a session with high school seniors studying American government, and from media ops to a town hall meeting with local small business owners.

Sadly, while they are dealing with infrastructure issues, not much happening at the local government level to get Sidney’s economy back on its feet after June’s flooding. Looks like Sidney Dems will need to light some fires under some folks to keep our town from dying a slow and painful death.