April Meeting Thursday, April 20th – 7:00 pm
Lake Shore Volunteer Fire Company
4498 Mountain Road; Parking in back
Pasadena, MD 21122
Meeting this month will be “District 31 Night”
Come meet your representatives.
Speakers for the April meeting will be talking about the General Session in Annapolis and give us a legislative update. The speakers are from our Maryland House of Delegates and Senate districts.
How can I let my legislators know how I feel about their progressive bills?
It just got a lot easier with the help of the State of Maryland and some hard work by a few Republicans. The State of Maryland set up a web page, MyMGA, to make it easier for you to request to testify or provide comments on an upcoming bill. Once you get to that page and register, you will have access to all the bills that come before the general assembly. You can select the bill you are interested in and request to have an oral testimony or provide a written testimony. This will go to each legislator involved with the hearing for this bill. The hearing process is the most important part of a bill becoming law. That’s where the committee that hears the bill makes to decision to change the bill. At later stages, the bill can only be amended, and it is much harder, although possible. If good arguments are presented, it could kill or weaken a bill.
This is where you get help from Peggy Williams and others that review the bills, provide their comments on each bill, and also highlight in yellow, the bills with a short timeframe to respond to. Senate bills have only a one-day window and house bills have only a two day window ahead of the bills hearing. So, you only have one or two days ahead of the hearing to sign up to testify on that bill. So timing is of the essence.
Here’s the details on how to register.
Go to https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite# . In the upper right corner of that home screen is a small icon labeled MyMGA. Click on that and you can register with the system. You must register in order to use the system. It should be fairly easy to use this site, and there is a YouTube video put out by a Baltimore County Republican Women’s Group led by Kate Sullivan that walks you through the whole process at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rei9NVlKtsA. It’s about 40 minutes long and well worth watching it.
Once you get that far, send an email to Peggy Williams at ppfftt@protonmail.com. She should then put you on the email list.