Las Vegas NowHow Should You Contact Your Representative?
Reid's staff is split up by issue and they respond every time.Senator Harry Reid and Senator John Ensign's offices are getting flooded with people commenting on the auto bailout. The offices are also getting calls for help from regular folks as well.
So is your message or plea heard by your elected representative when you call?
The short answer is that every email, call, fax, and letter is read or heard and responded too.
In Senator Reid's office, the correspondence comes in and if the senator cannot help, his staff tries to direct people to the right place.
If the senator can help, the problem is sorted into issues. His staff is split up by issue and they respond every time.
Carol Pittaro is glad about that. She wanted to spend her golden years with her life partner traveling the country. She ended up fighting the federal government just to survive.
Pittaro met her husband when she was just 10-years-old. Anthony was 15-years-old. They ended up married and moved to Las Vegas.
Her husband worked at Area 51 for about a decade. He retired, was diagnosed with leukemia, then passed away in 2001, forever altering their retirement dream to see the United States together.
"I had to work till I was 67 so that I could get a little more in my pension. He died when I was 66," she said.
Because her husband worked in secret, the Department of Energy denied both her illness benefit claim and then her death claim. Frustrated, desperate and struggling to live on her fixed income, she turned to Senator Reid's office in 2005.
The call was directed to Reid's outreach coordinator Kathleen Rozner.
Rozner worked for two years with the support of Senator Reid. Finally this June, seven years after her husband's death, the call came, "I says, ‘You mean that I don't have to write any letters anymore?' That was the first thing I said to her."
Pittaro will never get back the lost years but now her husband's hard work eased her financial stress as he originally intended.
Senator Reid's office will take all forms of communication. His people respond to each and every one.
William Moran, Jr. has overcome a loss of hearing, but sometimes the communication barrier can be insurmountable. In July, his daughter got a job and called the Social Security Administration to remove her from disability coverage.
The government agency mistakenly removed the entire family, "They kept saying, ‘Two weeks. Two weeks we will fix it. We are sorry.' Then nothing would happen over and over."
Moran lost his Social Security checks as well as his Medicare coverage for him and his son. Four months of continued visits resulted in a huge waste of his time.
Two weeks ago he contacted Senator John Ensign's office. A call that went to staff assistant Elsa Galzan, "The best way to contact us is an any way that works for them. We don't have a preference. Anyone who contacts us will get an answer."
The answer came from the senator's regional representative Kathie Ambrosio, who ended up being our interpreter.
A few phone calls solved Moran's months of headaches. The next time he calls Senator Ensign first.
With this weight lifted, Moran can focus on raising money for the National Deaf Seniors of America conference being held in Las Vegas in 2009. His attention has been divided until the help from Senator Ensign.
