SFSU Requesting Local Elected Representative to Ban Plastic Bags Letter Writing

Businesses are directly affected by local environmental factors: competition, zoning restrictions, infrastructure maintenance, safety & security, taxes and many other issues. In all Bay Area counties, the governing bodies representing communities are boards of supervisors, elected individuals who each represent a district in the county (you can easily find your community’s supervisor by searching on “xxx county board of supervisors”).

As a business owner or manager, one of the important skills to develop is the ability to reach out to your elected Supervisor and make your voice be heard. If you take up this assignment you will probably be surprised at how responsive most supervisors are to questions and recommendations from their constituents!

This assignment requires you to compose and send a letter by email to the supervisor who represents your district. Consider a topic of interest to you and relevant to your community. Please do NOT use Corona virus issues, actions involving the pandemic are not in the purview of the supervisors. This could be a concern about a recent decision to allow a chain retailer into a neighborhood, recent crime trends, infrastructure needs, new taxes, safety or any other issues. You can also choose one of these topics which are definitely topics that supervisors can influence via legislation:

• Ban the use of single use non-compostable plastic bags – especially those clear plastic bags given away FREE by grocery stores;

• Or, require grocery stores to charge a fee for shoppers who don’t bring their own plastic bags on shopping trips;

• Enforce proper sorting of black landfill – green compost – blue recycle bins by using inspections and imposing some type of financial fine for violators;

• Actively conduct regular inspections of the use of blue disabled placards on cars parked on the streets (this is known to be a common abuse, i.e. non-disabled family members illegally borrowing and using disabled family members’ blue placard, but the City is not doing anything to enforce this law); or

• Increase the enforcement of fare skipping on Muni and BART, including strict financial penalties for violators.

Supervisors have their own website which you can use to send them email messages. I want you to compose your email message to your supervisor on their web site. BEFORE you send it, please take a screen shot of your message on their web site. Upload this screen shot to iLearn.

Then take the email text and use it to compose a formal letter addressed to your supervisor as a Word document, as if you were to print and mail it via ground mail.

This assignment (20 pts) will be graded on the basis of:

· 5 pts – Clarity of message and persuasiveness of case in your formal letter (including secondary research – statistics, facts, science etc – is a PLUS;

· 5 pts – Quality of English (spelling, grammar, punctuation & syntax) in your formal letter;

· 5 pts – Professionalism of your formal letter’s language and format in your Word file; and

· 5 pts – Posting a screen shot of your email on your supervisor’s web site.

As an added bonus, if your supervisor responds to your message, forward it to me and I will award you 5 extra credit points.

This is a great opportunity to get some experience communicating with your local politicians – it is fun!