Monetti: Labor needs more candidates for local office

By CARL GREEN
Illinois Correspondent

Belleville, IL – Pam Monetti has been a familiar face in the Metro-East Labor Movement in many capacities for years, but she is now taking a bigger step as a candidate for Democratic State Central Committeewoman in the new 13^th Congressional District.

Monetti, of Bunker Hill, is currently the Macoupin County Democratic Party chair. She told the Southwestern Illinois Central Labor Council at its meeting last week that she plans to use the committeewoman position to get more Labor people to run for local offices such as school boards and city councils.

“What I really want to do is to be able to start recruiting in the 13th Congressional District, trying to get more people out there, trying to identify those individuals and get them to run for office and then help them raise the money so they can run and win,” she said.

“We have to start getting more people in those lower-level races, like school board and township, and I also think it’s important for us to get Labor people in them. Those are the positions that make a lot of decisions about who’s going to be doing all the work – like school boards, and especially on the roads,” she added. “There’s going to be so much done on the infrastructure.”

SERVING LABOR AND THE PUBLIC
Finding Labor members and Labor-friendly candidates to run will serve both the public and the Labor Movement, she said.

“We really, really need to have those individuals, to identify them,” she said. “And that’s always the hardest thing to – to identify people wanting to run.”

Monetti’s other roles have included being co-president of the Illinois Democratic Women for seven years, Labor representative to the southwest Illinois division of United Way, on her local school board for 12 years, as an aide to former U.S. Rep. Phil Hare and as a representative of American Income Life. She has even been scholarship director for the Southeast Missouri Central Labor Council.

JUNE 28 ELECTION
In Illinois’s June 28 primary election, Democrats will elect a committeeman and a committee woman from each Congressional district. Registered voters may cast their ballots early from May 19 to June 27.

Longtime Democratic Party leader Bill Hoolihan of Springfield is also running in the 13^th District, which reaches with spider arms across the state to collect many of the downstate cities, forming a Democratic majority district including the Metro-East, Springfield and Champaign-Urbana areas.

Former U.S. Rep. Glenn Poshard and Vivian Robinson are running in the 12^th Congressional District, which now covers the rest of southern Illinois and is considered heavily Republican.

Republicans, meanwhile, have chosen to elect one committee member for each Congressional district instead of a man and a woman. The registration deadline is June 1. To register, or for more information, go to the State Board of Elections website at elections.il.gov.