Legislative Update: Jan 9, 2007

By: Prospector

Today we met with 3 new Assemblymen and 1 new Senator. We welcomed them to Albany, introduced ourselves and outlined our organization and our mission statement. Some were already somewhat familiar with ABATE through their predecessors. All meetings went well, and only one was with staff as the Assemblyman was at a press conference. All seemed agree-able to our position in general. We caught up with Donna Lupardo in the hall and she confirmed that she will be re-introducing the confiscation bill, so we met with Senator Robach's office to be sure they did the same. We stopped by our friend Ron Canestrari's office to congratulate him on his appointment to Assembly Majority Leader, he has always supported our issues and has sponsored some of our bills in the past. We also met with Jim Tedisco, Assembly Minority Leader who wants to "let the bikers ride without helmets".

So far there is no information on committee assignments and very little speculation, so we'll just have to wait and see. The atmosphere of optimism remains high and the new Governor has the legislature off to a flying start, lots of meetings. The downside (for us) is that the dust hasn't settled yet and most of our legislators are too busy to meet with visitors. So far, we only have 4 appointments for next Tuesday, so I will be on the phone all day tomorrow trying to fill out the rest of the day. We met with a friend today who promised to get us a meeting with someone from the Assembly Speaker's office. That would be a first, so we're looking forward to it. We also hope to be able to meet with the Governor at some point.

As promised, I also received a package of the new bills introduced since session started. There are a lot of them, so I haven't had a chance to go through them yet to see what pertains to our interests. I will be getting an updated package weekly, so I'll have to try and keep up with it. So much for this week, hopefully, our momentum will start to build in the coming weeks and we'll have some progress to report.