Exciting news from the recent meeting of the Central Committee for the Utah Democratic Party - three new issue caucuses were approved!
- Native American Caucus
- 33 Percenters (Senior Citizen’s) Caucus
- Outdoor Caucus
Four bylaw amendments were presented to add the above caucuses as well as a Secular Caucus. After some discussion, committee members voted to table a decision about the Secular Caucus until members from that group could be at a meeting to answer questions. Committee members then voted to approve the addition of the three other issue caucuses.
Committee members also heard an update from the Restructuring Task Force. Marcus Stevenson, Secretary for the Utah Democratic Party reported that the task force has been working to incorporate feedback from the recent Listening Tour and modify the party structure so that it will be more open and grassroots based. The proposed structure would reorganize the state party under two main functions - Governance and Elections.
Governance. This function would include the Central Committee and a Judicial/Rules Committee. The Central Committee would be the main driver of the organization with responsibility for communication, budget, and trainings. The task force is proposing to reduce the size of the Central Committee from 350 to 214 people in an effort to make this committee more productive. Some members expressed concern that reducing the size of this committee would be discouraging to people that want to be involved in the organization and the response to this concern was that there will be opportunities for more people to get involved in the subcommittees of the new structure. Another proposed change would be to incorporate trainings into Central Committee meetings to help disburse information and knowledge from the state party out to the county parties.
The Judicial Committee would be responsible for fair campaigns, intra-party disputes, and Executive Committee removals. The Rules Committee would be responsible for all rules amendments, the National Delegate plan, and election procedures.
Elections. This function would include Candidate Recruitment and Coordinated Campaigns. While both of these committees are focused on candidates, the opinion is that the skills and tasks needed for recruiting candidates is different than those needed to run the coordinated campaigns. Candidate Recruitment would involve relationship building and networking and the Coordinated Campaign Committee would be responsible for campaign-related tasks such as candidate training, polling, messaging, voter registration, and voter persuasion.
The Restructuring Task Force continues to work on this project and will provide updates at future meetings. For more information, visit the task force page on the Utah Democratic Party website.