Good evening! I hope everyone got their taxes filed, or requested an extension. If not you probably have another hour! Here in Massachusetts it’s also Patriots Day… that whole Midnight Ride Of Paul Revere (and others who didn’t rhyme in the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem), Lexington, Concord, the British Are Coming thing. And it’s ALSO Boston Marathon Day!! Casa Brillig got our taxes filed a couple of weeks ago, and thankfully didn’t owe much. But that didn’t mean I was paperwork-free this past week! Let me tell you…
Like many of you might also be, I am a member of my local Democratic Committee. In our case, it’s my city committee. We are the local grassroots arm of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, and for the past several years I’ve been our Treasurer. My city is divided into a number of Wards, and each Ward has a City Councilor (we also have several Councilor-at-Large) as well as the right to elect delegates to the State Democratic Convention each year. We’re a relatively small group; with all wards meeting together monthly we have maybe 25 regular attendees.
Every four years, the Ward and Town Committees must Reorganize. This is why my name and all members of our Democratic City Committee (and the corresponding Republican City Committee) appeared on the Presidential Primary Ballot. Easy, right? Fill out a form for the City Committee, we’re all done.
Nope.
State law requires that EACH WARD reorganize, electing at a minimum three officers: Chair, Secretary and Treasurer. They MUST be three separate people, and the Treasurer may NOT be a municipal employee. I want to stress that our Ward Committees do NOT function independently, do not handle money, etc. Oh, and the reorganization meeting must be public (even though no one but committee members can vote) and happen in the window of April 4-14.
Two of our Wards had only three people elected on the March ballot, and in one case, all three members are municipal employees. NO ONE wanted to go through this exercise in bureaucratic paper-shuffling, but if we didn’t, the Ward committees would be dissolved.
In the space of two weeks, our City Committee Chair and myself (who has the most experience dealing with the state, since I’m the Treasurer who files all our reports) got all our Wards organized, made sure every Ward had people for each office, found someone who met the qualifications for membership (attend 3 meetings and be voted in by the committee) but hadn’t been on the ballot, got them voted in, had a legal meeting, and made sure they filled out the paperwork.
Tomorrow I’ll take all the Ward paperwork, scan it, and get it emailed/dropped off to the four offices it needs to get to. And THEN we can be done with this bureaucratic exercise until 2028.
Are you a member of your local Democratic Committee? If so, do you have to do this reorganizaation thing every four years, or is it a Massachusetts thing?
I’m tired! But it’s time for the Tops, so let’s hop below the fold and see what we’ve got!
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