Welcome OCF Family,

FYI, This motion failed at the March OCF Board Meeting
The vote on the motion was:

  • 2 in favor

  • 7 opposed

  • 1 abstention

  • 1 member absent.

This site is dedicated to helping members of the Oregon Country Fair (OCF) understand the upcoming proposal to have members vote on a Bylaw change. Helping people sift through the “Article this” and “Section that” of this issue to really understand what is being discussed has been a struggle. Below is the simplest explanation I have been able to come up with. The rest of this website contains more detailed information to support what is written below.

Under the “Rights of Membership” section of the Bylaws is a portion which specifies the voting rights of members: the Voting Rights section. This section of the Bylaws may not be changed without approval by a vote of the members. The first sentence of the Voting Rights section specifies that new members of the organization shall be entitled to vote 30 days after becoming members. We will call this the 30-day clause.

While working on what would be needed for the OCF Board to establish a minimum voting age, some on the Joint Elections and Bylaws Committee wanted to both change the 30-day clause, and argued that it should be completely removed from the protected Voting Rights section of the Bylaws. Moving this clause would strip it of its status as a protected right. Future Boards could change the provision at will, without member approval. There are numerous implications to making a change like this, but the bottom line is as follows. Reasonable minds can disagree on the importance of the 30-day clause and debate whether or not it should be a voting right, but in the end, it is a voting right because it is in the Voting Rights section, which our Bylaws specifically say cannot be changed without approval of the membership. As such, it needs to be treated with the same care and deference as any other voting right. If any change to it needs to be made, it is not hard to seek the required approval of the members.

It is important to note that any change to the 30-day clause is completely optional. No change is required to establish a minimum voting age.

I objected to the Joint Committee’s proposal to make changes to the Voting Section without member approval. Arguments were made at the Joint Committee meetings that the 30-day clause isn’t really a voting right, so the Board can change it without member approval. That is a dangerous slippery slope. Since, then, there has been a great deal of contention about legal advice and what the Bylaws say. In the end, the legal advice aligned with my position, which is that the members would need to approve any change.

Now, it would be easy to ask the members to approve any change to the 30-day clause that might be desired, including asking the members to delete the 30-day clause if the Board thought that clause did not belong in the Voting Section of the Bylaws. Instead, the Joint Committee has chosen to propose something confusing, indirect, and, I’m sure unintentionally, unethical. The motion coming up in March claims to “clarify” voting rights by adding a definition of voting rights specifically to exclude the 30-day clause from requiring member approval to change. However, the motion does not say anything about eliminating or changing the 30-day clause, even though that is what the motion is for.

The proposal is deceptive. It may appear to many that voting rights would be expanded, when, in fact, the goal is to ultimately remove or change a part of the voting section without membership approval. That is unethical. This proposal obfuscates its actual purpose.

The above-board, transparent approach is to simply embrace the position that the entire voting section of the Bylaws contains only voting rights and thus requires membership approval to change. If the Board thinks something should be removed from the voting rights section, they should simply ask the membership to remove it. If the membership says no, perhaps it should not be removed. (I have offered what I believe to be a better solution).

(You can read the motion and offered justification by clicking here.)