The time is right to contact the Speaker of the New York City Council, Christine Quinn, and ask for her support of policy initiatives against the spread of bed bugs in our city. We want to ask you to continue to write letters and make phone calls to your own council member to seek his or her support of Intro 873, the bed bug education bill currently in the Health Committee. However, together we can make the Speaker of the City Council aware of our struggles with bed bugs and ask for her leadership and support for legislative proposals and a comprehensive bed bug policy for our city.
The Speaker has a contact form that is very easy to use. If you need an idea of what to say to the Speaker, please feel free to copy and paste from the suggested sample letter below. (We will suggest other tools to contact other officials as our efforts progress.)
Please make sure, however, that you write a paragraph about your own experience and your own concerns. That is really key.
If you haven’t read the New York Times editorial, please do—it is a very clear and timely call to action!
Finally, please let us know that you did write to the Speaker. Leave us a comment so that we can keep track. We are so grateful that you want to participate in this effort! Please contact us if you have any questions or have any ideas to share or discuss. We would love to hear from you.
Sample letter to the Speaker of the City Council in support of bed bug policies and a bed bug task force
Dear Speaker Quinn,
I am writing to respectfully urge you to help stop the spread of bed bugs in our city. Bed bug infestations are extremely challenging to eradicate and are spreading throughout our communities, causing financial hardship and physical and emotional distress to thousands of New Yorkers.
[Note your personal experience of bed bugs and your own concerns about the spread of bed bugs in our city.]
The New York Times’ editorial of January 14 calls on our city and state elected officials to “press for better training and more rigorous certification of exterminators, more public education about these pests, tougher standards for used furniture and a task force to figure out how to stay ahead of an army that seems to be growing every year.”
Please help shape a policy response to this emerging threat to our city’s quality of life through appropriate short-term measures, such as bed bug trash disposal procedures and a public information hotline, and long-term strategies, such as a public information campaign and the creation of an inter-agency bed bug task force to survey the extent of the problem, coordinate and direct resources to affected neighborhoods, and help New Yorkers cope with physically and financially draining bed bug infestations.
I respectfully urge you to hold hearings on introduced legislation in the New York City Council (Int. 57-2006, 873-2008 and 872-2008) that would create a bed bug task force, an education program and bed bug trash guidelines.
Respectfully,
[Your name]
These pages may be of related interest:
I updated my last post’s comments on Bedbugger to reflect this request and link to it.
As I said there, Quinn appears to be an excellent Speaker IMHO. She has sent me many email updates on issues which I’ve signed on to in the past. The impression given is that she is very responsive to what New Yorkers want.
So I think it is well worth the effort for us to write and tell her how much the bed bug problem matters to us.