Marty, John's present thinking is that the bill should move through the Senate committee pretty quickly. After that we'll assess the need for letters. Some members are already writing; there's no need to discourage them from doing so. Dave ________________________________ From: Marty Woll [mailto:n6vi@socal.rr.com] Sent: Fri 10/9/2009 1:26 AM To: arrl-odv Subject: [arrl-odv:18155] Re: S 1755 Thansk, Dave. At what point should we gear up a letter-writing campaign to seek support and co-sponsorship? Would Chwat & Co. handle the delivery of such letters as they did on the House side? Have a productive trip to ZL. Marty N6VI ----- Original Message ----- From: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ <mailto:dsumner@arrl.org> To: arrl-odv <mailto:arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org> Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 2009 5:53 AM Subject: [arrl-odv:18149] S 1755 John Chwat has been working hard to line up a Senate counterpart to HR 2160. He has been working with both the majority and minority staffs of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The staffs stressed the importance of its being introduced on a bipartisan basis, and in that regard - with considerable assistance from ARRL officials and members in Maine - we hit a home run: the sponsor and original cosponsor are, respectively, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Committee! This virtually guarantees that it will move through the Committee. The text of the bill, S. 1755, is slightly different from the House version, in large part in order to make its referral to this committee (rather than Commerce) appropriate. John is working with the staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security and the original sponsor, Rep. Jackson-Lee (who sits on that committee) to get the House's treatment of the bill to align with the Senate's. Attached is an unofficial, but presumably final, version of the Senate bill. Thomas (thomas.loc.gov) should have the official text in a couple of days. John Chwat and his staff deserve a big hand for their work. It hasn't been easy getting to this point; there were several potential pitfalls along the way that John was able to navigate around. 73, Dave Sumner, K1ZZ <<radio op final.pdf>> S.1755 Title: A bill to direct the Department of Homeland Security to undertake a study on emergency communications. Sponsor: Sen Lieberman, Joseph I. <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/?&Db=d111&querybd=@FIELD(FLD003+@4((@1(Sen+Lieberman++Joseph+I.))+01385))> [CT] (introduced 10/6/2009) Cosponsors <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d111:55:./temp/~bduQks:@@@P> (1) Latest Major Action: 10/6/2009 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.