My Year with the Grassroots Effort to Authorize Public PowerBy Joanne McCaughan A year has passed quickly by while we've been busy working on the effort to secure public power for our Thurston County community. I remember attending an organizational meeting early last winter at a local pizza joint, seeing some old friends and familiar faces, others new. I went in wondering what we'd learn that night about public power, and left knowing we could make it happen. The energy in the room took me by surprise - it was electric! Meeting followed meeting, holidays came and went. With the New Year, the Thurston Public Power Initiative campaign was launched. Leadership emerged and paperwork was filed with the state declaring our purpose, to put an initiative on the November ballot. Decisions were made about organizational structure, printing petitions, establishing a phone line, creating a web page and our logo, a symbol of our struggle. Thousands of voter signatures would need to be collected. It was February, then March. It was raining, snowing, and blowing and out went the power. The energy among the team was amazing, and volunteers were learning step by step what needed to be done to succeed. More and more people began to show up, some to help educate the volunteers, who in turn educated the voters, challenging themselves to give, to work, and believe it is possible to take back our power from the corporate utility. The organization needed structure; committees were considered and established. Decisions were made about how to reach the voters, folks sharing knowledge from past campaigns, sharing courage for long hours spent away from home and family, from work or other obligations. Ignoring the exhaustion, counting the days to the deadline for signatures to be turned in...counting the signatures, again and again, and we did it! We had thousands more than were needed, and the energy we gained from this victory was astounding. Suddenly it was summer, the season for bicycle rides and beach walks, mountain hikes, and tending our gardens. But we were looking at ways to win this campaign. We faced the reality of campaign financing, and reached deep into our own pockets, auctioned pies at a pizza party, sold t-shirts and buttons, and were grateful for every dollar and every in-kind donation, and especially for the generous gift of office space. We raised and spent less than $40,000, a very respectable amount of money for a legitimate grassroots effort at the county level. We produced campaign literature explaining the facts, designed a beautiful yard sign and placed more than 900 of them around the county, and yes, we picked them up too. Fall arrived, and with it the final countdown to the election. We participated in a public forum, and our volunteer efforts doubled, tripled; we had folks out on street corners morning and night waving campaign signs. We rallied on Halloween to show folks we were not scared. We knocked on doors, sent out flyers, made phone calls, broadcast on radio and were featured on TCTV. We sent speakers out to local organizations and successfully reached out through the local media such as this publication as well as Works in Progress and Olympia Power & Light, but were generally stonewalled or maligned by the daily corporate media outlet. As for the utility, their profligate spending of over half a million dollars speaks for itself. In the end, we won nearly 40 percent of the vote, an astounding success! And we have only just begun. Please join us as we move forward to continue to build support for public power in Thurston County. We appreciate the support of the more than 40,000 citizens who voted 'Yes' on Proposition One, all the dozens and dozens of individual donors, more than one hundred volunteers, and the organizations who supported and/or endorsed us during this initial campaign: The Olympia Food Co-op, Traditions, Citizen's Band, WFSE Local 443, SEIU Local 1199, Thurston Conservation Voters, Occupy Olympia, TC-ProNet, and the Thurston County Democrats. Joanne McCaughan served as treasurer for the Thurston Public Power Initiative Campaign. For more information, go to the Thurston Public Power Initiative at: www.thurstonpublicpower.org
Back to Home page. |
