Politics on the Hudson

Ernie Garcia reports:

A group of 25 Yonkers residents took a bus to Washington, D.C. this morning with the group Community Voices Heard to lobby Congress and members of the incoming Barack Obama administration.

Community Voices Heard is an advocacy group that lobbies for low-income housing and it has a chapter in Yonkers, where the group has criticized downtown redevelopment because it does not address the housing needs of the working poor.

“We see that corporations and the auto industry are getting the biggest welfare and bailout, but if I screwed up I would not be able to get anything,” said Yonkers resident Annette Arthur. “We as low-income people
ask too and we are being turned away.”

Arthur and other Yonkers residents are part of a 110-member delegation sent by Community Voices Heard from its chapters in New York City, Yonkers, Newburgh and Poughkeepsie.

The group will first travel to Congress to deliver letters to local representatives asking for meetings and to drop in on the auto industry bailout hearings.

Then the group will attend Realizing the Promise: A forum on community, faith and democracy.

That forum assembles 40 groups from around the country who will ask that the voices of low- and middle-income communities be included in the Obama administration.

Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s assistant for intergovernmental relations and public liaison, and Melody Barnes, the next director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House, are expected to attend the forum.

Realizing the Promise’s web site claims that the women’s presence is the fulfillment of a promise made by candidate Obama a year ago that he would meet with grassroots leaders during his transition if elected.

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