M-Term: Interning for Council Member Abbie Kamin - Friday - Transportation Policy Council

 Friday- Transportation Policy Council 

    Friday was an online day, since for staff they usually do half days, and in the morning there was only one meeting and it was online. The meeting was the Transportation Policy Council for the Houston-Galveston Area Council. It was a very very very long meeting about transportation proposals and updates. The most interesting part was at the very end when they discussed bylaws. The meeting was live-streamed on the website HGAC, which stands for Houston-Galveston Area Council. After the meeting, which lasted all morning, I worked more on the Planned Parenthood brief, and on the BARC assignment that I talked about in the last blog. I was not able to completely finish either because my family has been dealing with a minor family emergency this week, my dad got hurt and has been unable to move without severe pain, so the rest of Friday was spent taking care of him. For the Planned Parenthood brief, I worked on finding the districts that each Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast location is in. This ended up taking way longer than it should have because I completely missed the website that allows you to just put in an address and it will tell you what district you are in, so instead I pulled up the City of Houston Council Districts map, and cross referenced it with google maps to make an educated guess. This worked surprisingly well, there were two that I missed because District B is very weird, and has a bunch of little pockets where parts are District B and parts are not City of Houston, so for those I put that they were in District B, when they were not actually part of the city at all. When I eventually realized that Kate had put that website in the word document, I crossed referenced all the ones I guessed to make sure they were accurate. My Friday evening was not affiliated with Council or my internship with CM Kamin, but it still fits perfectly into this world. As you may know, I volunteer a lot with Harris County Democratic Party, and through them I was invited to Commissioner Rodney Ellis’s house for a reception to welcome Minnesota's attorney general, Keith Ellison, to Houston. He was speaking at a convention, that I also worked at on Saturday, so this was their way of thanking him for speaking. At this event I exercised my political knowledge and social skills talking to politicians, that I have been practicing all week through my M-Term. On Saturday I also had a small conversation with Commissioner Lesley Briones, and she recognized me from the meeting I joined with CM Kamin last Monday, this was very exciting for me. I am excited to continue next week! 


Council District map for the City of Houston








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