Meeting of 10 October, 2009

Minutes of the LPSF Meeting of October 10^th, 2009

 

Members Present: Rob Power (Chair) presiding, Francoise Fielding (Secretary) recording, Leslie Mangus, Ron Getty, Marcy Berry, Michael Edelstein, Phil Berg, Tim Kuklinsky, Starchild.

 

Non-members: Joe Rogers, Charles Olson, Win Hayward.

 

Officer’s Reports:

 

• Treasurer: Marcy Berry reported that we started the month with a balance in the bank of $2,490.86. We received 3 new memberships at  $25 which Marcy transmitted to the LPCA. Francoise Fielding donated $124.67 to pay for one year of RingCentral. Marcy paid out $190.80 to SiteGround Webhosting and bank of America charged us $5.72 for that transaction since SiteGround is from out of the country. We ended the month with $2,419.01 in our bank account. With the $20.64 we have in petty cash, the LPSF has total funds of $2,439.65 This is  $168.56 less than we had last year at the same time.

 

• Secretary: Francoise Fielding had nothing to report.

            The Minutes of the Meeting of September 12, 2009 were adopted.

 

• Vice Chair: Ron Getty had nothing to report.

 

• Chair: Rob Power reported that he had received an email from Chris Maden. Chris’  local Libertarian group meets in the Liberty Bookstore.  He wrote that between last month and this month one of our LPSF posters appeared on a wall of the bookstore in a frame.

            Rob said that he had posted the LPSF ballot recommendations to the website the          same day date he received his absentee ballot so the recommendations have been   there since people got a chance to vote. Rob also reported he had created an LPSF          Facebook group. (There was an LPSF Facebook group that was set up a few years     ago by someone else but that person has disappeared).

 

Committee Reports

 

• Outreach and Newsletter:  Rob Power reported that no postcards were sent out this month. Rob asked for feedback on the mass email system. Do we want to use  php for mailings? It is built into our website and is free. We would use it in the situation where we have libertarians’ email and they haven’t subscribed to lpsf-activists. The group decided we would not use it to announce meetings but that we would use it to mail out ballot recommendations. (We have emails for registered libertarians).

• Bylaws: Nothing to report.

 

• Website and Database: No one has heard from Bryce Bigwood in a while. Rob Power asked for more authors to contribute to the website. He and Ron Getty are the only ones who are contributing.

            We are getting updates on the database from the state party.

 

• Membership and Fundraising: Nothing to report.

 

• Initiatives: See below for discussion on Tax Relief for San Francisco Elders.

 

• Campaigns: John Dennis, a Republican from Campaign for Liberty, asked Phil Berg not to run against Nancy Pelosi. John thinks if he gets his party’s nomination he has a chance of winning and he would like our votes. John is good on war and on the Federal Reserve but not on other issues. If Phil ran then he and John could debate. At our request, Phil agreed to run.  He needs a campaign manager and a treasurer. It was suggested that Marc Joffe might be willing to help him again.

 

• Social Networking: Rob Power created a Facebook group for the LPSF.

 

Announcements: 

 

Michael Edelstein reported that Code Pink has changed its position on the War in Afghanistan because the group is worried about the situation of women in that country should we leave. It was suggested that under that rationale we should be at war with all other Muslim countries.

 

Michael Edelstein is giving a talk at Berkeley on Wednesday October 28^th   from 7-8 pm on “How To Be Happy in a Statist World or How Not To Be Depressed about the Depression”. The location is 263 Dwinelle Hall. Michael will go by BART. Phil Berg and Rob Power plan on going with him.

 

 

Old Business

 

• Top-two Primary: Rob Power tried to call Richard Winger from the meeting but was unable to reach him.

 

New Business:

 

• Send Richard Winger’s letter regarding independent ballot hurdles as In-Meeting Activism at November meeting? AB 583 (The California Clean Money and Fair Elections Act) raises two issues: public funding of political campaigns and increased difficulty of ballot access for candidates who are not big party candidates. This is a power grab by Democrats and Republicans. The public funding would be subsidized by a fee on lobbyists (this is the part we object to) and voluntary contributions. Rob Power tried to call Richard Winger from the meeting but was unable to reach him.

 

• Participation in Bay Area Patriots (conservative group led by Sally Zelikovsky) group calendar. We would provide a link to their events and they to ours. We don’t really want to promote conservatives issues that we  don’t agree with and they won’t be happy promoting issues such as drug legalization and gay rights so we shouldn’t link with them. We weren’t specifically asked so no reply is necessary.

 

• Tax relief for San Francisco Elders? Ron Getty proposed an initiative whereby people 65 years and older would have the option to opt out of property and parcel taxes on their primary residence. The amount by which tax collections would be reduced because of this would be distributed across all departments. This is a divide and conquer method. Young people will pay all the property taxes. If we are against taxes then why should we pick a group? Ron Getty says we have to start somewhere. Rob says the idea is to get people talking about property taxes. We could stress in our press releases that this is a multi-year strategy.

            If we want to do it in a way that doesn’t look like it is pandering to a group we could suspend property and parcel taxes for the first five years for first time             home-owners.  Baltimore does this. This would bring younger people into the        city. Ron will draft an initiative along these lines for the next meeting.

 

In-Meeting Activism (Get everyone set up on Social Networking and flesh out new phone line auto-attendant options)

 

• Phone: We have five extensions on our phone service at RingCentral. We will do a brief welcome and referral to our lpsf.org and then use the extensions for 1) membership, 2) meeting information, 3) calendar, and 4) issues.

 

• Facebook: During Rob’s MBA  program one of his professors stressed joining a church or synagogue for social networking. Facebook is the San Francisco version of that. Twitter is more complicated than Facebook and MySpace is not as popular. Members should set up at Facebook page and link to the LPSF Facebook site. Then anyone who looks at a member’s page sees LPSF activities.