Salt Lake County Republican Central Committee Meeting Sept. 24, 2016

Saturday morning I attend the Salt Lake County Republican Central Committee Meeting at Jordan High School in Sandy. It started at 9:05 AM with registration previous to the meeting. It ended about 1:10 PM. So it was a long meeting.

The meeting was conducted by Suzanne Mulet who is Salt Lake County Republican Party Chair. First was a continuation of the meeting in June. Technically it was a continuation of an adjourned meeting. The business was to elect three new members of the Bylaws Committee. There were 8 candidates, all but one were nominated by themselves. There were three rounds of voting. It was planned to have electronic voting via the SLCo GOP web site, but there were technical difficulties, so we had to have paper balloting. Each candidate had 2 minutes to introduce themselves and tell their qualifications and then we had ballot boxes and stood in line to cast our votes. The winning candidates were Fred Cox, Alan Monson, and Carolyn Sharp.This was a lengthy process.

There were 281 credentialed attendees at one point. This is a small percentage of those who should have attended. It is necessary to have at least 20% of precinct chairs present to constitute a quorum I think, and it was sufficient for that.

While votes were being counted all candidates for public office were given the opportunity to speak. Actually there were only a few candidates present. Some of them were there in the hallway before the meeting started giving out signs, flyers, T-shirts, buttons etc. but most of them left after the meeting started.

We heard from Richard Snelgrove who is running for County Council and David Robinson who is running for County Mayor. There were several people who are running for state legislature and a representative for Mia Love named George Ferris spoke on Mia's behalf.

Also while votes were being counted we had officer reports. Suzanne Mulet reported on the committee's plans for social media campaigning. We need to define our image as Republicans and not let the media label Republicans. The committee chose three GOP ideas to focus on: Freedom to Be, Transparency and Local Determination. Here are examples:

Medicare Expansion is an issue of local determination.

K.I.S.S. is an issue of transparency.

Land Use is an issue of local determination.

Self-Reliance is an issue of Freedom to Be or Freedom2B.

Here are suggested hashtags for us to use: #utpol  #utgop #slcogop #how2bgop #freedom2b #transparency #localdetermination #votelocal

Scott Miller is our Salt Lake County Republican Party Vice Chair. He spoke about voter registration. Voter registration forms were passed out. We were encouraged to get new people in our precincts registered to vote. He also talked about fund raising and suggested cares.savvi.com/slcrepublican party 

{I tested this link and could access the Savvi home page but not the page specifically for Salt Lake County Republicans. Maybe it is not quite set up yet.}

Hopefully Savvi will be a very good thing to raise funds for our party and for a charity as well.

Scott also spoke about a possible need for security for future meetings and about GRAMA requests that have been made to county government. The Salt Lake County Mayor's office has not been forthcoming with information. More transparency is needed. He advised us to refer to the party web page for upcoming information.

Ben Soholt talked about an #iamarepublican campaign. He demonstrated a live Facebook video and challenged everyone to make an #iamarepublican video and post it on Facebook. {The goal of this campaign is to make the point that Republicans are normal people with lots of diversity.}

Roy Harris gave a financial report in keeping with his role as treasurer.

There was one auxiliary report by the chairman of the Salt Lake County Young Republicans. Salt Lake County Young Republicans Facebook page.  This group has monthly meetings and is open to anyone who wants to attend. The target age group is ages 18 - 40.

New Business was next on the agenda. The GOTV or Get Out the Vote program was presented. This is a plan to be implemented in the next five weeks to help elect Republican candidates in Salt Lake County and $30,000 has been budgeted for this plan. A powerpoint was shown detailing what will be done. An attendee was concerned that all of the $30,000 is going to be spent by the party's executive committee and no funds are going to be given directly to individual candidates. There was a motion to allocate half of the money or $15,000 to be given to individual candidates. There was passionate discussion and then voting on the motion. The motion failed. The meeting was adjourned shortly after 1:00 PM.