05/31/06
 

The 104th General Assembly ended Saturday, the 27th of May. Each General Assembly lasts two years and consists of a long session the first year and a short session the second year. For the 104th, we were successful with 9 bills of the 11 we worked on and that's one hell of a record. We lost the ROW bill. I made a mistake in the way I managed it but we learned an important lesson and we will be successful with the ROW bill next year. I'll tell the complete sad story in next month's newspaper.

Did I mention that this year we not only killed the 'no kids on bikes'
bill, we vaporized it. That idiotic piece of legislation won't be back for several years if at all.

We let the helmet bill die so yes, we lost that one too. Everybody on the legislative team worked that bill to the max. There were a few things we could have done differently, but I don't think any of them were significant enough to have made a difference. 25+ CMT/ABATE members worked on that bill plus several legislators going flat out and we got help from some of the most successful lobbyists in Tennessee. I don't even want to speculate how many hours went into the work or how many trees got cut down to provide the paper for all the handouts we researched, wrote, attributed, got printed, stapled, and distributed.
The bill was presented in a professional manner and was skillfully managed by people who know way more about it than I do. Yep, we lost, but all 25+ members, the legislators, and the lobbyists involved can walk away from that knowing that we gave it one hell of a shot.
Every one of you who attended Lobby Day provided more help than you'll ever know and you can walk away proud too.

So, we lost the lid bill but what did we gain? We kept every friend we had when we started two years ago, we brought 12 legislators over to our side, we gained legislators who won't support the helmet bill but will and did actively help us with other bills.

We now have a comprehensive 1.5 gig library of information we can draw on. We wrote 87 position/data/persuasive argument/graphs presentation pages, all carefully researched and attributed. Any of those 87 pages can be mixed and matched and custom built into any kind of helmet presentation document we want specifically aimed at one group or for any multipurpose I can think of. We established friendships with staffers who can be tremendously helpful. We built a bus load of good will and positive opinions of bikers. Lobby Day was a big factor in that. Our bill in the Senate was completely clean of amendments of any kind.

That's never happened before.

All of this lays a strong foundation for next year's effort. We got beaten in the House by forces stronger than we are. Two of the House members who came over to our side told me they did it because we have been there every year for 22 years and they thought such persistence should be rewarded. That will continue to happen. Additionally, as older legislators are replaced by younger people, that will help us.

We're not done for the year by a long shot. We've got to see if we can't help a few unfriendly legislators lose their re-election bids. We need to pay back some serious debts by helping in the re-elections of those who have helped us in every way they could. My main passion is legislation. Carol Simpson's main passion is elections. Carol has kindly agreed to be the honcho of our efforts to get the right people elected and the wrong people unelected plus choosing the new candidates to support. Wayne Shaub and I will be helping Carol but she will be the architect of our election efforts.

Once again, muscle flexing at election time is something we can do with your help but without your help, we don't have a prayer of making a difference.

Jp

PS. By keeping the lid law alive to the very end, we got a wonderful opportunity in the last week the legislature met. We thought maybe, just maybe, that might happen and it did. It fizzled but we gained some ground and it makes quite a story. I can't put the story in writing but will tell it to you at the June BOD meeting.