Response Requested

A June letter about trees began Brian McCarthy’s frustrating saga
with Tucson’s congressional offices. That saga recently ended with
another letter—but McCarthy suffered through a lot of frustration
in the interim.

Three months ago, my friend McCarthy read an Associated Press
article about an Army Corps of Engineers proposal. The story reported
the Corps wanted all trees growing near levees in the United States
removed for public-safety reasons.

McCarthy didn’t like that idea, and on June 11, he wrote
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the House Armed Services
Committee, which oversees the Corps. Five days later, he also contacted
his own representative, Raúl Grijalva.

He didn’t receive a response from either office after about three
weeks, so McCarthy wrote again. Another 10 days later, he sent a third
letter to both representatives, informing Giffords: “Your failure to
respond to my previous letters has shown me that further correspondence
on this subject would be a waste of my time and postage.”

Both offices cited similar explanations for the lack of a response
to McCarthy: A flood of input from constituents.

Natalie Luna, a press aide to Grijalva, says the office receives
between 500 and 700 e-mails, 300 faxes, and 100 letters daily, as well
as numerous phone calls—a volume which has been on the rise
thanks to the national health-care debate.

“Honestly, we’ve been overwhelmed. … It’s the heaviest since the
congressman has been in office. … In late July and the first two
weeks of August, it was a firestorm,” she says.

C.J. Karamargin, Giffords’ communications director, indicates their
office typically handles about 13,000 letters, faxes, phone calls and
e-mails a month. But “for June and July with the energy bill, it
totaled 39,000, and then came health care. The weekly average for
contacts went from 3,100 to 4,700.”

Ron Barber, Giffords’ district director, adds: “We were scrambling
to keep up, and regret (what happened) with Mr. McCarthy.”

Another explanation offered for the lack of response to McCarthy is
the number of staff people—22—that each congressional
representative is allowed.

“The people doing the responses,” Barber says, “that isn’t their
only job.” He adds that the health-care forums Giffords held took up a
considerable amount of staff time.

“I’m not trying to whine,” Barber says, “but given the number of
contacts, and even though we’re trying to get better, there’s only so
much we can do.”

On July 27, Giffords finally wrote back. She informed McCarthy that
she had forwarded his letter to Grijalva’s office, since McCarthy lives
in Grijalva’s district.

This practice, “congressional courtesy,” calls for a person’s own
representative to respond to a constituent, even if correspondence is
sent to another member of Congress.

“The people of the district hired their representative,” Karamargin
explains, “so she must answer to them.” He suggests people check their
voter registration card, or log onto the Pima County Recorder’s Web
site, to check which district they live in.

“If it was opened up to committee issues,” Barber says of the
courtesy policy, “the volume would be unmanageable, and the contacts
would come from all over the country.”

After receiving Giffords’ letter, McCarthy replied, informing her
that he had already written Grijalva. Since he didn’t live in Giffords’
district, he also requested the return of a small campaign contribution
he and his wife had sent her, a request which was complied with late
last week.

Meanwhile, McCarthy still had not heard anything from Grijalva after
sending three letters. In his third communication, dated July 24, he
also raised another issue: whether Grijalva would ever even see his
letter.

Both Luna and Barber indicate that the correspondence each office
receives is condensed into a regular report for review by the
congressperson.

Extremely frustrated with the lack of attention, McCarthy fired off
an irate fourth letter to Grijalva on Aug. 7.

“He was asking for very specific information,” Luna points out about
McCarthy’s request. “It takes time to contact the Corps.” Luna also
says that Grijalva’s office strives to have a response to a constituent
within 10 days, but needs more time with a complicated issue like
McCarthy’s.

“If more than enough time has passed,” she says, “they should
contact me directly. We want to help. That’s our job.”

About 10 weeks after McCarthy’s original letter, Grijalva’s response
was finally sent on Aug. 28. The two-page letter goes into detail about
the tree cutting issue, correcting some statements made in the AP
article.

Near its conclusion, Grijalva’s message states: “I will work with
colleagues … to ensure that public safety needs are met while
upholding a high standard for maintaining a healthy environment around
levees.”

McCarthy says he now has a better understanding about why things
happened the way they did.

“Perhaps things need to be revised so the congressional offices have
more people to handle the workload,” he suggests.

“I still think six weeks is too long to get a letter out which says,
‘You shouldn’t have written me,'” he says about his communication from
Giffords.

While pleased with the response he finally got from Grijalva,
McCarthy remains unhappy that it took 2 1/2 months to prepare.

At the same time, McCarthy intends to send Giffords another campaign
contribution (which he won’t ask to be returned). He says he regrets
some of the things he wrote in his letters.

“I want to write another letter (to both elected officials),”
McCarthy says, “which is somewhat apologetic.”

This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2009.