Greetings fellow Libertarians,

My name is Greg Holland. Last month at our annual county convention I was elected chair of Libertarian Party of Wake County. As vice chair last year, I had the opportunity to learn how the party works, and now have a better idea of what it will take to keep things moving in a positive direction. I hope to continue that process as chair this year.

I’d like to take a moment to thank Joy Elliot, who served as the chair for the past two years. Joy was a great help and we hope to see her around at events throughout the year.

Along with myself, there are a few new faces to our WakeLP executive committee. Brian Lewis will replace me as the vice chair. I look forward to having his knowledge and energy to support me throughout the year.

Brian Irving, who many of you may know from his work with the state and in our county in the past, has been elected secretary. His years of experience and his knowledge of the political system will be invaluable.

Brad Hessel, who was treasurer last year, will stay on. Brad worked very hard last year to get our books and accounts in order so that we could move forward and start getting things moving. With his continued help everything should run smoothly.

While I have mentioned that last year we moved forward and made progress, many of you might not be aware of any progress at all. This is because the majority of the last year was spent getting things organized and modernized. In some cases Brad had to bust through line after line of bureaucracy.

With the help of Ken Penkowski (last year’s secretary/media/graphics) we’ve updated our county website, grown our Facebook and Twitter followers and designed an updated logo among other things. The point being, some of our improvements you may have seen, but most of them you haven’t. This year that changes.

With everything organized behind the scenes we are ready to get out and get involved. While we don’t have anyone running in the 2014 county elections, we’ll be supporting the campaign of the winning candidate in the May 6 Libertarian U.S. Senate primary, and we are actively looking for candidates in the 2015 and 2016 local elections. If that’s something that might interest you, please get in touch with me.

       One fun project you can help with right now is to help us rate the candidates who will be on the ballot in November in Wake County as to their “libertarianism.” The concept is to ask each candidate to fill out a survey form and—for the majority of those who don’t respond to our request—to fill it out for them based on their platforms and campaign materials. The ratings will be published on the internet. This serves several purposes:

·         Provides valuable information to voters who are interested in liberty issues (which should be everyone!)

·         Lends us a “presence” in every race and encourages voters to think about liberty issues

·         Highlights the need for better candidates

·         Raises the consciousness of the legacy party candidates with respect to the fact that they will be held to account by us

·         Affords WakeLP volunteers (this could be you!) improved familiarity with current local and state issues and political players

If you are interested in helping us out with this project, please drop a line to Brad Hessel.

I would like to thank you all for your commitment to Liberty and hopefully I can meet more of you throughout the coming year. That could happen most any Thursday night at our weekly social meetup at The Gourmet Factory; check out our Facebook or Meetup.com pages for more info. We can always use volunteers and donations, as a smaller party we have to be self-supporting to survive and make our presence felt, the Koch brothers don’t write us checks.  Without  dedicated people like yourselves that is not possible.