2019 Platform Committee Work Plan

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What’s the Platform?

The platform is one of the guiding documents of our party organization. It lays out our values, principles, and goals. We revise our platform every other year, with final adoption at the Legislative District Caucus. 

The Platform Committee has started work on revising the 45th District platform ahead of the 2020 caucus. Our primary goal as a committee is to gather and incorporate feedback from Democrats in the 45th District so the platform can be representative of our values. With that in mind, we’ve created a work plan anchored around our touchpoints with the community.

Starting Point and Scope

We’re approaching this work as a fearless and critical revision of the existing platform – we don’t see any major problems with structure, and believe the existing platform aligns fairly well with our current values, so we don’t see it as necessary to rewrite from scratch. We also believe that we should not feel overly attached to content in the 2018 platform going forward, so we’re considering each point on the existing platform with a critical eye to see if it should be kept as-is, improved, or removed entirely.

Every party organization, from the Legislative District to the DNC drafts their own platform. Because of this, we believe this platform should be primarily concerned with issues important to the 45th District. This means we’re focus on city, county and state issues, but national and international issues are not irrelevant or out of order. 

Section Plans

We considered the headings of the sections in the 2018 platform, and decided they provide a good framework to start from. We’re going to work section-by-section on the platform, spending about one month on each. We plan to spend the first half of each month gathering general, open-ended feedback on the sections being worked, and working on a draft of the section. Then, we’ll hold a public meeting where we present what we have so far, gather more feedback from the public, and refine our content. The remainder of each month we’ll spend reaching out to the community to answer specific questions or provide targeted feedback about areas we need help with. 

We’ve decided to work on the sections in this order:

  • October
    • Sections
    • Meeting
      • Saturday, October 12th, 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
      • Duvall Public Library
        15508 Main St NE, Duvall, WA 98019
  • November
    • Sections
    • Meeting
      • Saturday, November 16th, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
      • Kirkland Public Library
        308 Kirkland Ave, Kirkland, WA 98033
  • December
    • Sections
    • Meeting
      • Saturday, December 14th, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
      • Kirkland Public Library
        308 Kirkland Ave, Kirkland, WA 98033
  • January
  • February
  • March
    • Assemble platform into single document
    • Talk about sections we may have missed
    • Work on preamble