Dear Stop-the-Chop friends and members, We are making great strides in our battle to restore our skies and our sanity by grounding the tourist helicopters. On June 6, City Hall held a meeting of some 20 elected officials. The good news? All but one support a ban on these flights! The bad news? The lone holdout is the Mayor, whose City-run Downtown Manhattan Heliport is the launch pad for all the helicopter tours. So we are getting closer, but we are not there yet. Here are three simple ways you can help get us the rest of the way: #1: Email our Elected Officials. That's quick and easy to do. Our site lets you send an email to all the officials whose districts are affected by this with just one click: http://www.stopthechopnynj.org/how-you-can-help.html Please let them know that Mayor de Blasio can no longer put narrow corporate interests ahead of the health and welfare of hundreds of thousands of his constituents. #2: Print Out Our Flyers. There is strength in numbers, but that requires getting the word out. We have a flyer which you can print out on our web site (click here:http://www.stopthechopnynj.org/uploads/2/6/8/3/26837994/mayor_flyer.pdf) and circulate in your community. Every apartment building has one or more places – e.g., a bulletin board -- where a flyer can be lawfully posted. Please make sure your building knows we exist. #3: Write a Letter to the Editor. The days of stamp licking are long gone. Letters to the editor are now all done by email. At the bottom of this email, we list all the email addresses. Please, please, please send a letter to the editor to one or more local papers, outlining your hatred for helicopters, and mentioning our web site (www.StoptheChopNYNJ.org). The free publicity would do us a world of good. Some tips: Keep your letter short and sweet. That makes it more likely to be published. And don’t send a group email to all the papers. They won’t publish non-exclusive letters. (You can send the same letter email to every paper, but you need to send them one at a time.) If your letter is not published, wait a couple weeks and try again! Lastly, particularly for papers like the Times, it helps if you can relate your anti-helicopter letter to an existing story recently published in the paper. We are almost there. Keep up the fight, and with your help, we will win. Stop the Chop NYNJ WHERE TO SEND LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: letters@nytimes.com voicers@nydailynews.com. letters@nypost.com Editor@downtownexpress.com editor@ebroadsheet.com editor@downtownpostnyc.com