To all SD11 activists, we had our quarterly SREC meeting over the weekend and it was a pretty busy weekend. We had our committee meetings on Friday and the general meeting on Saturday. We had a lot to discuss and evaluate the impact of the bills passed by the legislature this session.
At our meeting on Saturday we had the RNC field director come by and discuss the plans to start implementing the field operations that the RNC will be providing for Texas. These plans are currently long term and there will be a permanent staff here to help our state grow the Republican Party. These staffers will be in the field in minority communities across the state working to grow our party in those communities. They will be hiring local folks to work in their own communities. They will also be hiring some now former RPT staff to help with those efforts and they will work out of RPT headquarters, we hope this will lead to good cooperation between the groups.
In addition to the RNC people, they will be hiring 100's of folks across the targeted states; the RPT will be hiring 15 additional folks to start working victory operations and opening up victory centers around the state. We have not decided on where they will be as of yet.
In redistricting news the Supreme Court may release a finding on the Voting Rights Act as soon as this week, but no one is for sure. Once we get that ruling we will know which direction we may have to take with redistricting efforts.
As chair of the rules committee we spent a lot of time discussing a few rule changes that we had to make to the RPT rules that we want to present to the convention next June. The first of these rules is that we have to reverse ourselves and remove the rule we just added that allowed for the convention to select the national committeeman or committeewomen if there is a vacancy in either of those positions during a non-presidential year. By current rule the SREC would select a replacement until the next convention. We received word for the RNC that to do that would violate their rules and that the replacement recognized by the RNC would only be the initial person selected by the SREC. Unfortunately faced with this ruling we have decided to remove the convention portion of the rule and take the rule back to what it was before we made a change.
We also passed a rule change that would allow the SREC to direct the chairman to post our yearly audit report on the website as long as any politically important information is removed.
The third item we had a lot of discussion on was creating a standing rule addressing if guest at the general meeting could videotape the proceedings. The SREC has had a longstanding custom to prevent the use of videotaping during the meetings. One of our members felt that there should be a standing rule replacing the longstanding custom. We developed a compromise rule on the rule committee that would prevent guest from videotaping but would require the SREC to videotape the meeting and post that tape on the website and live stream the video during the meetings. On the rules committee we felt that was a good compromise. In the general meeting the discussion was centered on what was acceptable to be shown on the web. Mainly what type of items the democrats may use from these broadcasts? After hours of discussion we decided to still prevent guest from videotaping but have the RPT staff videotape the meetings and we eliminated the live stream of the video. The chairman or the SREC body itself will determine what can be placed on the website at a future date.
We also passed four resolutions with one declaring our opposition to the UN Armed Trade Treaty and asked the RNC to push for the rejection of this treaty. We also passed a resolution on illegal fishing in Texas's coastal waters. There was also a resolution showing our support for the Texas Three Step plan of community outreach into black communities all across the state which our outreach operations will be working on over the next two years. We feel this new plan will help create an opportunity to make a lot of inroads into these communities. We also passed a resolution asking the RNC to eliminate the "carve out" state primaries and have a fair primary plan. We also passed a resolution similar to the one passed by the RNC honoring Borah Van Dormolen for her years of service to the party.
We also started some discussion on the implication of HB 3102 which is basically a deregulation of the party oversight by the state legislature. If the Governor signs this bill the SREC will have the ability to set party policy in place of the legislature as is now the case. We all had issues where we thought it would be good to do some things but we could not due to state law, now we can do some items like changing our primary and changing our rules. We will be looking over this a lot between now and our next meeting to develop a set of rules that we can set and some rules that we will have the convention vote on. More on this as it develops over the next few months
At our September meeting we will be honoring our Volunteers of the year across the state for each senate district. Our SD11 Volunteer of the year for this term is Debbie Roan, congratulations Debbie and I hope you can make it to Austin in September to be honored with your fellow honorees.
Thanks and God Bless,
Dennis Paul
SREC SD11
Thanks and God Bless,
Dennis Paul
SREC SD11
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