[Cprb] Contacting Urbana City Council members

[John Wason]

At 08:52 AM 10/10/03 -0500, Walling, Jennifer wrote:

>Hi everyone,  
>
>A couple of things.  Last night I spoke with Laura Huth about the CPRB and
she gave me some tips to how we should proceed.  She said that first, we
should talk with Ruth Wyman.  I live in Ruth's ward, so I figure I could
contact her and set up a meeting?  If I tried to set it up for October 20
or 21 (the day we don't meet), who else would be able to go?  I'll try to
figure out her availability in the next couple of weeks.  And then she said
to use the following order - Danielle, Esther, Laura, Milton Otto, Joe
Whelan.  And she thought that we should contact Ken Pirok in Champaign
right away to set up a meeting.  Does anyone live in his district?  and
John Paul, Elaine will answer your concern about the NAACP soon.  
>
>-jen 

I have very mixed feelings about this.  I'm delighted with Jen's energy and
enthusiasm (and some of the rest of you, too), and I don't want to throw
cold water on it for anything in the world.  But....we've already met with
all of these city council persons, except for Joe Whelan (who refused to
meet with us) and Ken Pirok.  What would be the purpose of meeting with
them again at this juncture?  Danielle made it crystal clear to us that
what she needs in order to sponsor a CPRB ordinance is BROAD COMMUNITY
SUPPORT.  So in my opinion that's where we need to be focusing our
energies.  I don't know precisely how to go about garnering that support -
that's not my strong suit, but appears to be the strong suit of people like
Jen and Ken Urban - but I do know that we don't want to go running into a
city council meeting half-cocked without the foundation properly laid.  

This ties in with Ricky Baldwin's comments, too, about having
support/collaboration from the various minority communities.  I agree with
Elaine that we can probably count on some sort of support from the NAACP,
but I don't want it to be PASSIVE or TACIT support, because that won't be
obvious to anyone but us.  The support needs to be overt and active.  I'm
also interested in not just the CPRB per se, but in building a more durable
broad-based grassroots communication and coalition between the minority
communities and us.

Well, these are some of the things we need to talk about.  There's a
balance to be struck between moving too fast and moving too slowly, and I
fervently hope that we in our collective wisdom can find that balance.
Meanwhile, a sincere thanks to all of you for your comments and your
activities on behalf of the CPRB.

John