Febuary OCF Board Meeting Member Input from Steven Berkson

I realize that this voting rights issue has been wonky and confusing, and it is hard to describe the problems with the current proposal in a concise way, mostly because the proposal is, unintentionally I’m sure, complicated, confusing, and deceptive.

To say that putting this proposed question before the membership constitutes “letting the membership decide” is wrong. Without a petition, the membership is not deciding what question to consider, rather the Board is deciding. Any question the Board puts before the membership should be transparent and easy to understand, which the current proposal is not. It goes against everything I stand for in my service to the Board. My goal in facilitating is to provide transparency, consistency, and objectivity to the process. The goal of making changes to the Bylaws should be the same.

I will attempt to provide a concise explanation, but first, I want to be perfectly clear that one good choice is to do nothing. Change does not need to be made.

The Bylaws contain specific voting rights which cannot be changed without a vote of the membership. The first sentence of the voting section says, in essence, that new members obtain voting rights 30 days after becoming a member.

There has been disagreement about whether or not this 30-day clause should be a voting right. If you believe this 30-day clause is an administrative detail and should not be a voting right, the very clear and obvious remedy is to make that case to the membership and ask them to remove that sentence from the voting section of the Bylaws. That is simple and straight forward. Then we can all agree that the voting section of the Bylaws contains ONLY voting rights that require a vote of the membership to change. If the membership says no, then maybe the 30-day clause should remain a voting right.

Instead, the current proposal is to ask the membership to vote on a Bylaw change to add a definition of voting rights. This definition would make the voting section more subjective and open to interpretation. The entire purpose of the proposal is to allow the Board to say that the 30-day clause of the voting section is not a voting right and therefore, the Board can change it without membership approval.

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 hold that the entire voting section of the Bylaws contains only voting and requires membership approval to change. If you think something should be removed from the voting rights section, ask the membership to remove it.