Political Advocacy
Your legislators want to hear from you.
| PRESIDENT’ S PAGE |
M ost of us like to plan. It does not matter if it is our work day, a vacation or retirement. We correctly believe that it is easier to reach our intended goal if we have direction and a time frame to achieve our objective. Similarly, it is better to be proactive instead of reactive to situations that were not of our doing or choosing.
One of our associations most valuable benefits is political advocacy. Unfortunately for your government affairs committee, our lobbyists, and the staff that supports our advocacy efforts, the above paragraph is useless to all of them. In the current political climate the only plan seems to be to disagree, disparage and destroy anyone who opposes your position. It is very apparent that both parties are guilty. As the country and state that we live in become more partisan, it gets harder and harder to accomplish any type of legislative agenda. For us to be successful in our efforts, we need agents to reach out to their legislators.
Every year we send out legislative alerts to our membership asking them to contact their legislators and communicate with them about a bill that will impact insurance agents statewide. Your relationship with your legislators needs to be good enough that you can call them and discuss the situation with them. Your legislators do want to hear from you and they do need individuals that they trust to help them understand the consequences of their votes.
SCOTT STRONG KAIA President
It is not something I would want to do, but someone must run for each public office. I doubt many of the people reading this article want to serve in the legislature. It is easy to pick on politicians, but we owe them respect for their willingness to serve.
Look at things from the perspective of your legislator. If you were in the legislature, would you want constituents that were experts in insurance to explain the consequences of insurance-related legislation? Or would you prefer to delegate this to just our lobbing team? The best answer is a lot of both, but this will only work if individuals get involved. Our government affairs committee is the largest committee at KAIA. This is because we need a diversified reach across the state to communicate our message. The committee, our lobbyists and staff all work hard to get our message out, but we need help. We need your help. January and the start of a new legislative session will be here soon.
After beating up on our way of government, I am reminded of a quote from Winston Churchill:“ Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Contact Scott at sstrong @ strongsinsurance. com, or call KAIA at( 800) 229-7048.
2 KANSAS INSURANCE AGENT & BROKER | July- August 2018 |