Kansas Libertarian Party Report for the LNC July 2007 meeting

The Kansas Libertarian Party has what I believe will be some wonderful opportunities to reach out to the disenfranchised voters in our state in the next three months.

The KSLP elected two people (in non-partisan races) to office this spring – Larry Manes, Allen County Community College Trustee and Mike Wilson, Saline County School Board Member. At our state convention in April, I was unanimously re-elected to be the Kansas State Chair for two more years of duty. Our state convention was well attended (especially for an off election year) and we had an attendance at the business meeting of around 35 members.

In the next few months, we are doing more OPH booths than we have ever done. One big event is the Kansas State Fair in September, where if I have my history accurate, we will staff a 10-day long booth for the 18th year!

We will also be working (thanks to Travis Nicks - Colorado Chair) the Vans Warped tour event when it comes to Kansas City on Aug 15th. We are also staffing at least 5 other (new to the KSLP working a booth) venues for outreach.

We are in the process of creating a new tri-fold brochure that is specific to the KSLP – the staff at LPStuff (Webb Garlinghouse business in Topeka) is the creative and printing help for us to upgrade the brochure we have today. The old one was 2-color piece on plain white paper – the new one will be a 4 color glossy brochure.

Earlier this year we started a “subscription club” donor program via the LPKS.org website (using Paypal). I believe that like all LP organizations that our donations are slower than I would like, however this new program is starting to take off for us. I am lucky (depending on your view I guess) that as a state party we were very small when I took over as chair 2 ½ years ago - so our expenses have been very low – while we are not cash flush by any definition – were are financially sound today.

I am very pleased that we are going to start a new “local” group in a rural area of Kansas; the inaugural meeting will be July 28th. This is a new opportunity for the KSLP in that all of our local groups today are in urban areas and this will be the first chance in a very long time to start to reach people that we have not spent much time attempting to reach. Having grown up in “God’s Country” I know we will do well as a political party once we get a foothold there.

We have already started our push to recruit candidates for the 2008 election and my personal goal is to shatter our record of LP candidates in Kansas. We are off to a good start in this regard – due to the Kansas government ethics committee (GEC) rules, I am not at liberty to announce names yet – I do however already have many verbal commitments and that give us a solid base to build the 2008 election numbers on.

One other thing I am working on – I have started the process of putting together a multi-state convention in 2008 for the 4 states of Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska & Kansas to be held in the Kansas City area. A date is still being pinned down and the other states must approve that date and whether or not they will participate. I have hopes that it will work as well as the 3 state convention we did in 2004 (lead by Bob Sullentrup, which means I have high goals for the quality of the event).

Rob Hodgkinson
Chair - The Libertarian Party of Kansas
Individual Liberty -- Personal Responsibility
www.lpks.org

"Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure."