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Last year, as I was campaigning for this office, I knocked on many of your doors asking for your vote. I made a point to ask what you expect of your State Representative, and of your state government. One word came up time and time again: Transparency.

You wanted to know what your legislature is doing, how your representative is voting, and you wanted to be able to communicate with your representative. Sadly, this is not always the case in politics.

As a citizen, I expect each of these things from my representatives, and it would be hypocritical for me not to lead by example. I made a commitment during my campaign to set a new standard for transparency and accessibility as your State Representative.

In an effort to fulfill this commitment, I did a couple of things. First, I posted every vote online.

This year, the legislature passed over 1,000 bills that became law. Many of these were considered before the House multiple times before final passage.

Voters shouldn’t have to dig through records to find out where their representative stands on a particular issue, so I wanted to make it super simple. Each day, I posted every single vote that I took on my website. You can see the bill title and number, a short description, and an explanation of my vote. You can view each of my votes this session on my website at JoelBomgar.com/blog.

Second, I wrote a weekly email update to let you know what was going on in your legislature throughout the session.

Most people don’t have the time to keep up with what’s going on at the Capitol every day. That’s why at the end of every week this session, I prepared a short summary of the legislature’s work, along with some significant measures that we considered. Each of these are available at JoelBomgar.com/blog, and you can also sign up there to receive emailed updates during the session.

Lastly, I committed to being open and accessible to you.

One of the most common concerns I heard when going door to door last summer was that many people felt like they could not get in touch with their representative, or that they reach out and never hear back.

I want to be completely open and accessible to serve you, so my personal email, joel@joelbomgar.com, can be found on our website and on each of my communications. You can also reach me any time at my personal cell phone (601) 207-0813, or here on Facebook. To better serve you, I’m committed to being completely open and accessible to your questions and concerns.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post and to follow me. I very much appreciate all of you who reached out to me during the session with questions, concerns, and encouragement. Thank you for being engaged and involved in this process! Together, I know that we can make a great impact to help move our state forward.