Tell Speaker Rozzi Your Ideas About Healing Divides, Creating Fair Rules

From Fair Districts PA (http://www.fairdistrictspa.com):

Last week Speaker Mark Rozzi released a press statement saying “Harrisburg is broken” and announced plans for a statewide listening tour to invite public comment on how to heal the partisan divide, provide a more bipartisan legislative process.

Here’s the form to speak or submit comment. 

Two of the meetings are THIS WEEK: 

• The first meeting will take place on Wednesday, January 25, at 6 pm in Simmons Auditorium in the Jared L. Cohon University Center of Carnegie Mellon University, 5032 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh.
  The second is tentatively scheduled for Friday, January 27, at 6 pm at Temple University in Philadelphia (exact location still to be announced).
• A third will take place on February 2, 6 pm at Kings College in Wilkes Barre.
• The goal of these meetings, according to Speaker Rozzi: share ideas to heal the divides in Harrisburg, create a fair set of House rules, and create a plan to get survivors of childhood sexual assault the justice and truth that they so desperately deserve.”

A PennLive article gave some context for the Speaker’s effort, with responses from a mix of directions. We were amused to see Nathan Benefield of the Commonwealth Foundation insist that “Regular people don’t care what the House rules are or know anything about it. It’s an obscure thing.” We understand why he’d prefer the rules remain as they are. We would love to see lots of regular people show up to prove him wrong.

Please consider showing up and inviting others to do the same. Use any part of this email you think would be helpful.

Resources to prepare your remarks:

• Last week we emailed House leaders and the Speaker’s Workgroup proposals to move the conversation forward. You can read about that in our latest web update. We’re also attaching the pdf we provided.
• We’ve provided all our legislators with our recent Fix Harrisburg report: Dysfunction by Design: Why Pennsylvania’s State Legislature Is So Unproductive … and How We Can Fix It. The report provides examples of dysfunction, statistics about how our state legislature is falling short and ideas for a better legislative process.
• Best Practices for Collaborative Policymaking.  We’ve encouraged legislators to read it. It provides examples from other states of successful efforts to bridge the partisan divide.

Anyone who has advocated for change in Pennsylvania knows that Harrisburg is broken. It’s time to share those stories and our suggestions for making our legislative process function on behalf of the people of PA.