X-Message-Number: 23532
From: Tim Freeman <>
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 08:14:02 -0700
Subject: What happened at the hearing?

In cryomsg 23522, Mathew wrote:

>Letter from Joe Waynick:
>Early Wednesday morning, Barry Aarons, Tanya Jones, and I met with 
>Representative Stump and several of his advisors for nearly forty-five 
>minutes to discuss HB 2637.

This is good.  I hear he was nonresponsive before.

>a.  Expand the Funeral Board by up to two members to include experts in the 
>field of cryopreservation or change the composition of the existing board 
>to include up to two experts in the field of cryopreservation;

This wouldn't be especially good if it were written into the bill.
The range of numbers described by "up to two" includes zero, so you
need to know exactly how many you'll get.  If the other board members
are committed to vote against you, then you'll lose.  If the experts
are members of the society for cryobiology who have internalized the
bylaws of said society that forbid rational discussion of cryonics,
then you could get two experts on the board and lose unanimously.

>d.  Define the scope of the oversight through legislation and not left
>singularly up to a rules committee;

This might be good, depending on the exact legislation.

>e.  To extend the effective date of the bill to September 1, 2005 to
>leave open our option of legislative redress in the unlikely event
>that appropriate rules cannot be agreed upon between Alcor and the
>Funeral Board.

This is good if you can expect the bill to get passed with admendments
or to fail reasonably soon.  If it lingers for a year and then gets
passed with an effective date of September 1, 2005, then the time
crunch has worsened.  An effective date of at least a year and a half
after the bill is passed would be an improvement.

>The progress of today's hearing would not have been possible without the 
>tireless efforts of a number of good people

So what was the progress of the hearing?  You got to talk to Stump,
but that was before the hearing, not part of the hearing.

-- 
Tim Freeman                                                  
GPG public key fingerprint ECDF 46F8 3B80 BB9E 575D  7180 76DF FE00 34B1 5C78 

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