Lobbying - Logistics

I have a friend who lives in Tampa and he was kind enough to invite me to sleep at his house and commute downtown from there. He provided bus routes and times. And he suggested the best restaurant within walking distance of the convention center. He’s been a computer geek so I would be able to use his wifi to connect with the internet.

By searching the internet, I found a lot of places to eat. I also found a handy location of a Florida grocery chain, Publix, that we like down here. There was an oriental grocery listed as a few blocks further up the street that might be good for those on diets and those from overseas.

In February, there was a pre-conference event for church and secular press at the Tampa Convention Center so I drove from my friend’s house downtown and realized that if it weren’t for my GPS, I would have been driving in circles. Tampa was laid out by the same surveyors who laid out my home town of Waukesha, WI. Tampa is on a large bay so most of its streets are not lined up north-south-east-west but on diagonals and curves. Even my GPS was confused when I left my friend’s house and it circled me back to the house during the first five minutes of my drive downtown!

I found a good parking garage downtown next to the convention center and decided I’d drive back and forth from his house instead of trying to work the bus system.

The basics were in place.

Lobbying - Connecting with Key People

For some of my previous lobbying efforts, I developed lists of 250 delegates to whom I sent by mail general suggestions about how things went and essays on the direction of the church as well as encouragement to vote for my petitions. Most I did not know, though many I did or had been recommended to me by AIA colleagues.

I discovered to my chagrin that even those I knew the best were unable to help my petitions because of the rules of General Conference, especially that once a petition related to a paragraph of the Discipline was passed by a legislative committee, all other petitions related to that same paragraph could be voted non-concurrence without any consideration even if they could have added a different idea. (Rule 31 [2]). And some sat on their hands at crucial points in discussions, leaving my petitions without support.

I figured that for this time, I would let my petitions stand on their own merit and not push any of a dozen or so delegates about any of my petitions. What I did was pick people who knew me pretty well and try to help them with things like the Publix store, how to reach me, how to preserve a petition that didn’t get forwarded to the floor, and any other helpful thing I could do for them. I sent the same materials to staff, reporters, and some friends I knew were coming to Tampa. I copied the notes to the AIA board.

My working list ended up being too short. But word somehow got around and I found a lot of folks in Tampa who somehow got that same information without my help.

I kept them posted of changes and some other things through “Brief notes” by e-mail during the two weeks of General Conference. And I got to see most of them, if only for a few moments.

Of all I sent to them, the one thing that had the most impact was letting them know about the Publix grocery store. It did a booming business while we were there.

Thanks to a $7 purchase at WalMart of a bright red jacket, I could be seen from anywhere in the plenary. That became important when delegates wanted to talk with me or when I sent notes to delegates and had the page point out me in my red coat.

One person with whom I connected is the editor of United Methodist Insight, an on-line publication project providing a wide variety of articles and views of General Conference. She invited me to be one of her contributors and encouraged me to write about what was happening the first week because she was not going to be able to come until the second week.

A friend from Wisconsin who taught at Africa University asked me to make contact with two of its graduates who were coming as delegates. I wasn’t going to do traditional lobbying anyway. So I added that to my agenda and, without my realizing it, it changed what I ended up doing at General Conference.

April 22 - The Grocery Store

It was still fairly early Sunday morning so I decided to walk, travel case in tow, to the two grocery stores I had told my contacts about. It began misting. The weather I predicted (70 at night and 85 during the day with no clouds) changed. It was 65, the wind was out of the north, and the light rain was almost enough to get your clothes wet. But I was doing okay as I crossed the bridge over the Hillsborough River next to the center.

And there was the Publix. It was an older store without a pharmacy but its bakery and deli were as good as the ones at home. I bought a salad for lunch, put it into my travel case, and headed out looking for the Asian market I had found on the internet.

The wind was blowing harder and the mist was getting heavier as I hiked back across the river and turned up the street. I headed for where the buildings would protect me from the weather as I walked northish. When I got to the address, there was no Asian store. The delegates were stuck with American vegetables from Publix.