D4MC April link-up and endorsements

Written by: David VanDeventer on Apr 15, 2008 1:56 PM EDT

Linked to groups: Democracy for Monroe County

Hello All,

My name is David VanDeventer and I am your vice-chair for 2008.  I want to begin posting here on a semi-regular basis so we can keep members that can't attend the link-ups up to date on how things are going.

Last Thursday was our April link up and the topic was "drugs in the water supply".  We had three speakers: Carol Scifres, Geoff McKim, and Warren Henegar.

 Carol spoke about the amount of pills that are being flushed down the drains in Monroe Co. as pharmacies and social service agencies currently have a flush policy where any medication that needs disposing of is flushed down a toilet.

 Geoff and Warren spoke about waste management and water testing.  Geoff explained about the national requirements for which chemicals are tested for and how chemicals get added to the national list.  He also brought up a good point how requiring testing for thousands of chemicals is not feasible for small utility companies. 

All in all it was a very good discussion that lasted an hour.  Unfortunately I had to cut the discussion short as we had to conduct our endorsement process.  I started the endorsement portion of the meeting by reading a prepared statement about each candidate that the endorsement committee had decided to recommend for endorsement.  In march, the membership voted to go to a dues based membership rather than attendance based membership.  Eric Schmitz called role based on who has paid their dues for 2008 while I passed out the ballots to members on the list.  After all ballots were passed out I explained the ballot and passed around the "ballot boxes".  Because everyone that was present was voting members(25) Eric Schmitz and myself counted the votes.  Candidates with a contested primary were required to receive 2/3 of the total votes to become endorsed by D4MC.  This amounted to a required 17 votes.  Candidates without a primary opponent required only a simple majority of votes for a total of 13 required.  Listed below are the candidates that met the requirements set forth for endorsement and received the required amount of votes to be endorsed by D4MC.  Some candidates did not return questionaires and were therefore not considered for D4MC endorsement.

 County Commisioner District 2: Mark Stoops

County Commisioner District 3: Sophia Travis

Surveyor: Kevin Enright

Monroe County Council At-Large: Warren Henegar, Geoff McKim,  Julie Thomas

Monroe Circuit Judge VI:  Valerie Haughton

Monroe Circuit Judge IX:  Elizabeth Cure

Next Link-up: Thursday May 1st 7:00p @ The Village Deli

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Location: Bloomington, IN 47401