State legislative advocacy efforts for the 2004 “short” session of the North Carolina General Assembly are underway. The goal is to increase NC LIVE funding by $2 million in order to preserve existing resources, and marks a third year of partnership between the NCLA and the North Carolina Public Library Directors Association (NCPLDA).

The two groups again are working with Capstrat (formerly Capital Strategies), with Capstrat CEO Ken Eudy as registered lobbyist. The General Assembly convenes on May 10; the budget will originate in the House, rather than in the Senate as we initially understood.

The committee met on March 5 at Capstrat in Raleigh with Ken Eudy and other Capstrat representatives to begin planning for advocacy activities and to discuss approaches for collecting NC LIVE patron success stories from the library community. Bill Snyder (Henderson County Public Library) and Jane Rustin (Wayne County Public Library), respectively president and president-elect of NCPLDA, joined the group to cement this year’s advocacy partnership.

The group discussed legislative strategy and ideas for making NCLA membership better able to respond to calls for grassroots action. There was also a discussion about using an “idea generator” strategy to capture success stories from library staff about how NC LIVE has helped their patrons, particularly in the areas of retraining, jobseeking and small business. This activity was implemented via e-mail to the NCLA and NCPLDA listservs in March, and generated more than 20 pages of responses. Capstrat is now extracting the most compelling for presentation as part of NC LIVE publicity and advocacy.

The Public Policy Committee is modeled on the NC LIVE governance structure and seeks to include representatives at the leadership level in state university libraries, private/independent college/university libraries, community college libraries and public libraries. Members a this writing are: Ross Holt, chair; Sandy Cooper, Beverley Gass, David Goble, Peggy Hoon, Jim Kuhlman and Jerry Thrasher.