2008 Bylaw & Ritual Amendments and Resolutions

[arvid1978]

The proposed locations for the 2010 convention are Dallas and Atlanta. My personal preference is for Atlanta.

I actually prefer Dallas, but that's mainly because the train goes directly there from here. Atlanta had a good bid in 2000, but they were up against New Orleans and didn't stand a chance of winning. I'll have to see the presentations

AIV (Alumni/Internal Volunteers) Ref Committee:
1) Changing the Regional Alumni Councils to increase the number of representatives from each recognized group and section and make the representatives from the section appointed by the Section Chair, but not allowing the Section Chair to be on there. Shrug, not really sure.

I don't see any need to increase the number of reps, but if the alumni councils are supposed to actually be made up of regular alumni, I can see good reason to exclude section chairs, since they're not really as concerned with alumni issues as much as they are about the student issues.

2) Require the Alumni Voting Delegates be selected at least 90 days before convention. Probably a good idea, but I'd want to get a better feeling for how often the AVDs are selected an hour before convention starts.

Agree, it's a good idea, but in reality our Alumni Association base is not very organized to begin with. They should be doing this earlier, but if we're going to require AA's to do it, we should also require chapters to have their delegates done 90 days in advance. That would be more important, since there are over 700 student delegates and only 11 Regional Alumni delegates.

3) Alumni Association DSK. It would be orange. Sounds reasonable.

Kinda disagree. A chapter-specific AA should be allowed to submit nominations to the chapter to have the actives award them a Chapter DSK. An area-based should be allowed to submit to section/region for one of those DSK's. I don't see much of a need for this award. Also, the National Alumni DSK is the only other one not picked by a committee of students and I don't like having another award that is not decided upon by the students. If they're that worthy of a DSK, you should be able to make a case to one of those units.

CFO (Chapter/Finance/Operations) Ref Committee:
1) Change the term "Life Membership" to "Sustaining Membership" and tweek a few other things as a result. I like this idea and it matches up better with other organizations.

I'm obviously a very big fan of this one
I can see the argument to strike it altogether, since it isn't a class of membership. If it is to remain, I think it should be changed to this. It's confusing to the students, as many volunteer staff can attest, and would make it one less point of confusion in a sea of many types of confusion.

3) Change the word "Audit" to "Review" in terms of the chapter books, and specify that the person has to be seperate from the chapter and its finances. Proposed by the National Finance Committee. Apparently Audit means it has to be a CPA, which most chapters don't do. I think this will pass pretty easily, though I could see an amendment indicating that an Audit is needed if Chapter revenues exceed a fairly high threshhold, maybe $10,000

Agree strongly, although $10,000 is a low threshold for a lot of chapters, especially if you hosted a conference or an anniversary Perhaps the $25k threshold (I think it's $25k, anyway) that requires that you actually file your taxes would be better.

Membership & Extension Ref Cmte
1) Allow brothers to stay active if they are either at the school with the chapter or at a two year school without a chapter. This appears to be a reaction to a situation with a single particular brother who transfered from a school with a chapter to a local CC. I'm opposed unless it is part of a well studied decision to allow for area chapters like NHPCs (Historically Black Fraternities and Sororities)

I wholly disagree with allowing this. It just seems like back-door extension membership to me, and is just asking for trouble when it comes to non-students participating in a school's programs. Why allow chapters to set themselves up for charter-revoking failure (revoked by the school, not APO)

CC's can have chapters, depending on the makeup of the campus (disclaimer: I'm currently working with an extension effort at a CC with 10k students.) I'm a proponent of focusing more on that. Plus, IMO, if you have to leave your main campus and transfer to a CC for academic reasons, you probably need to be focusing on your education more. If you have to transfer for financial reasons, you probably need to be focusing on your income more. Either way, both of those things should be a higher priority than APO.

3) Elect the RDs at the Regional Conference rather than at Nationals, however allow replacement RDs to be elected at Nationals if necessary. On the surface I really like this, since many Regions have more chapters represented at Regional Conventions, especially if the National is on the other coast. OTOH, if the RD election is moved to the Regional Conference, then I think we *must* have another member of the board there to supervise the elections. Also, I think there are other parts of the by-laws that assume that the entire elected board is elected at one time, like the sections on removal for malfesence, this should be reviewed. I'm torn and this one will require some research

I don't like this one. While the students would be more involved in their RD's election,this would have the 1/2 board changing over at least once a year, and they'd never get anything done. This has been submitted many times before and never made it out of committee, AFAIK. I think it keeps getting re-submitted because the person putting it in believes that the RD is like a "Super-Section Chair", which they're not (at least, they're not supposed to be)

8) Disallow Regional Conferences from the same time of the year as National Convention.Right now, I/II, IV and X/XI Regionals occur between Christmas and New Years. They would have to change because of this. The person proposing this is from Region IV, so it may be something that should be dealt with internally within IV.

Agree with Randy. Deal with it in your region if you don't like i. Tt sounds like this came from a section that is really not fond of giving up the holidays every year for break.

As for the Ritual amendments, There are three entries, the optional big-brother ceremony and two relatively minor tweeks that are fairly uncontroversial.

Hooray for no Toast Song debate!

I didn't get my ritual amendment done in time (kept putting it off), but all it was going to be was an optional change to the pledge ceremony allowing for large chapters with large pledge classes to not have to bring people in and out of the room when they're hearing a particular part of the ceremony at the beginning. If you've ever tried to negotiate a 70-person pledge class through the ceremony as written, you understand what I'm talking about...