The Legislature must really not want to be bothered as it heads toward impeachment this morning. I just checked the Legislative Research Council’s website and found that someone has scrubbed all of the phone numbers and emails for our legislators from the Legislator Contacts page and from the individual legislator profile pages:
As a frequent flier of the Legislature’s website, I can tell you that the LRC website as regularly listed phone numbers and email addresses for each legislator. Now you literally cannot contact a legislator directly from the LRC contact page or any legislator’s profile page. In the left navigation panel on the Contacts page, there is still a link to a downloadable address list in comma-separated-value format, but that list gives phone numbers for only 73 of the 105 legislators, and it gives no email addresses.
Let us hope this removal of valuable information for open government and citizen participation is an error or only a temporary deletion as LRC works on some mysterious new method of supporting contact between legislators and the people they serve.
Cory
When a citizen is elected to public office you should be willing to be contacted by constituents. We see this failure at the state, county, city, school and other elected boards far too often. I was willing to be contacted when in office. Why not? That is your job. Another lack of transparency in our state.
fjk
why in god’s name would any of these people allow the dumb, dirty citizens to communicate with them FOR FREE!?!?
i don’t think so. buy a $500 ticket to a hot beef dinner like everybody else. get your picture. shut your mouth. go home.
Some things no longer surprise me.
Republicans seem to love dark, secretive government. Like Amazon’s website-only help I could find was a chatroom-no phone #s or anything. “We don’t want to hear from you-just buy from us” is just like the GOP!
Here’s a link as of 5:44 pm, Tuesday the 12th. Phone numbers are here.
https://sdlegislature.gov/Legislators/Contacts/66
Corey—can you get us a print -out of how the Republican Reps voted….we know how the Democrats voted in unison. The dynamics within the Republican Party are a bit fascinating…fun to watch the PARTY crumble.
You can see the House voting score board in a photo on this Kelo-TV story.
https://www.keloland.com/keloland-com-original/ravnsborg-impeachment-updates-from-pierre/
Mr. H can probably get a printout, and mail it out to all of us. Or, we could go look at the call of the rolls at https://sdlegislature.gov/Session/Vote/76017.
I think there are some of the media outlets with lists too.
It is good that most of the Conservatives with Common Sense were on your side today, Mr. Nemec.
Was this scrubbing of the emails done by request of the legislatures, or of the Council of Legislatures Director fellow who doesn’t like pestering? Perhaps he’ll put the numbers back when the pestering stops.
Republican Party is like WalMart– pay your taxes and get out of here!!
They forgot who the boss is — US the voters!
At 7:56 PM, I just followed the first link in this post, and found every legislator has at least an email address listed, while many also have a phone number listed. Maybe their temporary absence resulted from a web site change.
Maybe, Mr. Caleb. Maybe.
BuwahahahaHAHAHA. Or maybe the pestering has stopped and the Council of the Legislatures Research relented and put the public information back out to the public because Mr. H called out the Shamenun on them.
Interesting, John D—that’s the same link that was malfunctioning for me earlier.
Did LRC disappear those emails and phone numbers just for today’s Special Session?
Indeed, Mr. H. Indeed.
We citizens must not be easily able to pester the legislatures when they have important business. Now it is concluded, and we may pester once again. Until the trial portion gets close.
The most transparent and accessible government in the nation! Shaking my head. Keep being you, South Dakota.
Cory,
I don’t believe the website or the link listed was malfunctioning; it was working as designed.
Mr. Francis Schaffer