At the WEA Conference

I've been in Seattle for the day attending a WEA conference on small and rural locals, which morphed into a conference on collective bargaining later on in the day.

So far, so good. At the Small Locals conference there was some good dialogue about the issues smaller districts face. The organization could have maybe been a little better, but so be it. My president and I have been talking about raising our local dues for a while now (currently, they're $5 a month), and we think we've hit upon a good formula that would be acceptable to our members and give us some more wiggle room financially.

This evening we've moved over to the DoubleTree SeaTac for the bargaining conference. Beautiful hotel, big hotel. To get to my room you go down a hallway, up an elevator, over the skybridge, down another elevator, through the big long building to the next big, long building, until the numbers start turning into sevens. I don't think it's an exaggeration at all to say that I'm more a good three football fields away from the front desk. No problem; I needed the walking anyways.

There was also discussion of a potential ballot initiative, but I don't think I want to let that one out of the house yet.

Met Mary Lundquist for the first time. She seems nice enough; I look forward to getting to know her and Mike Ragan better over the coming years.

Tomorrow there's three breakout sessions on different aspects of bargaining; I'm looking forward to hearing what's new.

Gotta love conferences!