VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

Glory be to you, Joe Public

By Sam Pfeifle

The bad news is that four of your elected state legislators have publicly stated that they don’t want to hear from you. The good news is that former-state representative John Vedral won’t let them live it down.

Vedral, a Republican member of the 188th legislature who was defeated by a scant 22 votes in 1998, has been in the email list managing business for about five years, running an outfit called listMgr.com. On April 13, he began his first venture as a public service, an email list that allows any email writer to contact 166 of our state representatives and senators at the click of a mouse (there are actually 186 legislators, but some do not either use the email address offered by the state of Maine, or do not give out their email addresses). A wonderful way to encourage civic participation, right?

Well, Representative Christopher Hall (D-Bristol) wasn’t too pleased to be receiving the will of the people in his in box. “Please remove me from your spam list immediately,” he wrote to Vedral. “Too much spam from you today.” And thus began the Hall of Shame. And, to the legislature’s credit, the Hall of Glory.

“In response to the demands of a few and the support of others, I have created the Hall of Shame and the Hall of Glory,” Vedral writes in a publicly posted email. “Those elected officials who refuse to hear from the public will be cast into the Hall of Shame. Those who publicly support open discourse will be elevated to the Hall of Glory. Upon initiation, a notice will be sent to the new member as well as to Maine news outlets, assorted civic participation Web sites, and to the citizens who are known to have attempted to contact those officials.”

As of Tuesday, May 15, the Hall of Glory’s members far out-paced the Hall of Shame’s: 34 to four. Portland Democrat Glenn Cummings was among the glorified. Representatives Bob Daigle (R-Arundel) and Randall Berry (D-Livermore), along with Senator Tom Sawyer (R-District 9) — apparently he does not get high on you — join Representative Hall as publicly shamed.

Representative Hall thought maybe Vedral was making a buck off his new way of involving the public in the law-making process. Not so. Vedral spends “two to three hours a day responding to legislators and managing the list” without making one thin dime, he says.

“In fact, I’m composing a letter back to one right now,” says Vedral when reached by phone. He wanted to emphasize that the vast majority of the legislature has been very receptive, but “Some complained that the volume of mail is too high. That’s ridiculous. There have been about 100 messages over the past month. It’s less than 3 messages a day. They say that some are rude, ‘ranting’ is used a lot.”

“To be judgemental of the public and how they write is not what we’re looking for from the legislature,” Vedral continues. “We’re looking for them to accept the input. Email is still new for a lot of people, and the etiquette is not quite clear. People don’t say who they are and where they live. People have to learn to be patient.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the “one issue above all others” concerns public comment: LD 1337, a bill that would make it more difficult to collect signatures for citizen initiatives by keeping gatherers up to 50 feet away from voting places (see “Stifling citizen initiatives, Portland Phoenix May 11 – 17). “It’s a similar issue to getting email,” reasons Vedral. “If a legislator is being an elitist they will deny the collection of signatures and they will refuse to receive email.”

It is this civil right of public comment and participation in their own government that Vedral most supports, and, in general, he is succeeding. Asmainegoes.com, the Christian Civic League, and other citizen participation groups have already picked up on his service, and there’s a good chance the people making use of it will grow significantly in the coming months as the legislature begins to vote on the 200 or so bills before them.

“It’s great,” says Vedral. “There are people that are writing email that have never written a letter in their lives.”