Here is the start of some of the early happenings of this campign and how it came about:
Today is May 6, 2005 we have just finished a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Lakewood Republican Organization. I walked into the meeting (of the LRO) ready to tell them I was going to run as Candidate for the Ward 1 seat, however when I walked out I was committed to running as at large position on the essential premise of name recognition and those of the “kitchen cabinet” felt I had a better opportunity to obtain a top five spot in the Primary election.
The LRO is made up of people who feel strongly about how the not only the Country but also the city should be run.
Let me step back a bit to January of 2005. Ryan Demro a sitting City Council member called me to ask if I would be interested in running for City Council. Of course I said I was interested, what he didn’t know was that I had been interested in running for the past year or two but didn’t know who to talk with about it. I thought the GOP in Lakewood was a dead zone. It did not take long for me to realize that in the 2004 Presidential election that the LRO was a fairly formidable group of individuals.
In this cycle I met a man who I had hoped would knock of Dennis Kucinich our current Member of the House of Representative. His name was Ed Herman, he was not successful but he and his manager Ryan Demro sure made an impression on me.
Besides Herman and Demro, there was a third person who was very skilled at the political mechanizations and her name is Colleen Wing. She was a veteran of the political wars in Michigan and has come to Lakewood with her husband Eric and son Benjamin
Colleen has set a course for the LRO that could quite possibly set the organization on to be a political force that is similar to the City of Cleveland and Parma.
So with the help of Demro, Wing, Rita and the Executive Committee of the LRO we shall bring about a change in to local politics.
May 9, 2005
Met with Ryan, went over the numbers to establish how much it would cost for mailers towards the end of the Primary season. The Primary is set for October 4th. If I come out of that I will have only 4 weeks in which to campaign until the General Election.
We came up with the figures of little over $7,000 just to do the mailers. We estimated that it will take another $7-9,000 to cover the rest of the expenses, such as signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts and also to cover expenses for fundraising.
As through this whole consideration I kept thinking that this is a lot of money to spend for two year race, I had been incorrectly thinking that the at large spot was a two gig as well, but Ryan stated that these will be a four year deal. Which made me feel better about the money situation.
