Constituents send a strong message to their Congressman

Thank you to the 400+ people who packed the Montrose High School gym Friday night, April 7 for Rep. Scott Tipton’s first of three town halls during this Congressional recess. We had a blast!

The turnout was beyond our wildest expectations. Silly us, we only brought 60 WCC stickers to pass out – we ran out in about five minutes!

Great organizing by WCC and several Indivisible groups resulted in a crowd that spoke powerfully and pretty much unanimously on our issues. We sent a strong message to the Congressman with a barrage of smart questions (at least five of them from WCC members) on energy policy, environmental regulations, public lands, health care, budget priorities, the Trump administration and more.

For a flavor of what it was like, check out this short video on Facebook with two questions about clean energy and climate asked by WCC members Wayne Quade (Montrose) and Tanya Travis (Grand Junction). The sound quality isn’t great, so we’ve added captions. Please share – we want it to go viral!

For those who want the full town hall experience, we’ve posted raw video of nearly the whole meeting on Youtube. Thanks to Lehua La’a for the video.

This was an excellent demonstration of grassroots democracy – and an empowering experience for those in attendance to realize that we have numbers, and we’re powerful when we come together. Rep. Tipton didn’t always give the answers we’d prefer, but he was a trooper to stick it out, and he even extended the Q&A period, so we give him props for that.

Of course, it takes more than a town hall meeting to change policy. This is only the start. We have to keep growing our numbers, and hammering on our issues, and finding ever more creative ways to make our voices heard. But I think those of us who were there last night are buoyed by the sense that we actually can become the very people’s movement that’s needed now.