At 02:38 PM 10/8/2003, W5JBP wrote:

At the meeting in St. Louis group "A" came up with the suggestion that each division have a Congressional representative. It can be more than one and what I am thinking of is also involving the Section Managers.

It is no secret that I have been disappointed in the amount of grass root contacts our members have had with congressional representatives. I had asked John Chwat & Company to prepare a paper that would help us and it is below as a zip file. Print it out and let me know what you think.

As I said in a message to you in early August, "We used to have regular reporting of activities on the Hill from Steve Mansfield, at the [July] Board meeting we found out that Chwat & Co has continued to write up visit reports but they are not being distributed to the Board any more. It's been a couple of weeks and I've still seen nothing." In my brief discussions with John Chwat, he seemed quite frustrated that he was only dealing with you and Chris, and wanted to work more directly with Board members. We still don't seem to be getting copies of any of his reports with members of Congress, so maybe nothing is happening. My understanding was that our dependence on Chwat this last year or so was a temporary thing, and that Steve Mansfield's position was going to be filled. Is that the plan for 2004? I don't think we can possibly do a good job of Congressional relations unless there is focused staff support. I just don't think the program will work with Chwat working directly with volunteers (Board, Officers and members). Rather than taking this proposal as the final word, I'd prefer to have it reviewed by EVP/CEO Sumner. He's who we pay the big bucks to make things work. This program will cost some time and money, and we need to institutionalize it. The last several "projects" that we've embarked upon have suffered through a difficult start-up process because we did them on an ad-hoc basis (Big Project, DHS MOU, BPL). It also sounds to me like the decision has been made on which strategies have been selected for 2004 implementation. I think we ought to agree on them first before we just bull forward. -- Tom ===== e-mail: k1ki@arrl.org ARRL New England Division Director http://www.arrl.org/ Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box J, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone: 860-668-5444