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Failing to
acknowledge proposals offered by
membership
by Michael
Bluejay
Failing to
acknowledge proposals offered by
membership
by Michael
Bluejay
When the Board of Trustees changed KOOP's Mission Statement, they not only did so without consulting the membership and over the objections of many volunteer members, but their new version is riddled with grammatical errors. If our Mission Statement represents KOOP, then KOOP is represented as illiterate.
I therefore suggested that the Mission Statement be revised to fix the grammatical errors. I posted my complete proposal to KOOP's internal email discussion list. In my proposal, I asked the board to consider it as an official proposal and to take action on it. Not a single person on our email discussion list objected to the proposal -- not even Paul Odekirk and Eduardo Vera. In fact, Paul said he would support a grammatical upgrade of the Mission Statement.
(Three members of the board were subscribed to that list at the time -- including the board chair -- although one member claims that her email was unavailable for several months, including the time I sent out my proposal. A fourth board member has an email address, but refused to join KOOP's email list -- further evidence that board members don't feel a need to know about the concerns that volunteer staff are discussing.)
I offered my proposal in mid-April. By June, I still had not heard anything from the board, so I tried to attend their board meeting in early June. However, I could not find any board members at the station at the designated time. I discovered later that the board meeting was canceled due to lack of quorum. (The failure to meet quorum is a problem in and of itself.)
So I attended the next board meeting. This meeting was attended by only three of the six board members. When given my opportunity to speak, I started to present my proposal, giving the background about how I had posted it to our email list two months ago but how nobody on the board even acknowledged the proposal, nor shared it with other board members who didn't see it. But throughout my brief introduction, board members continually interrupted me, and I had to keep asking to be permitted to speak without being interrupted. After one such request, board member Carol Hayman, without looking up at me while she was writing, said, "Well, then, maybe you shouldn't be so accusatory." I replied that if I was being "accusatory" it was only by stating what was true. Not only had the board ignored my proposal, but they absolutely did not want to hear me remind them that they had ignored it. Carol's comment suggests that she feels (1) it was my fault that board members were interrupting me, and therefore that (2) board members were justified in interrupting me. I find this attitude to be extremely unprofessional.
(As for the disposition of my proposal, we agreed that I could present the proposal at a future board meeting. However, at the next board meetings, the board started its process of dismissing the General Manager, and I withdrew my proposal until such time as larger station-wide problems could be resolved.)
As a board member of another local cooperative organization, it would be unthinkable of us to not acknowledge proposals made by our membership, or to rudely and repeatedly interrupt a member when they have the floor during a board meeting. These incidents are yet more examples of why I feel that KOOP deserves new leadership.
Here's another example of the board ignoring items brought to them by the membership. This is an email posted to the KOOP mailing list by station engineer Jerry Chamkis.
Subject: Governance at the KOOP BoT :-(
Date: 05/15/98
From: jerry chamkis, jchamkis@bga.com
At the BoT meeting of 5-11-98, Ricardo Guerrero came to the meeting shortly before it dissolved (no formal adjournment motion) and the following exchange took place:
R.G. 'I asked to put in an agenda item about a follow up of- I called up earlier and asked to put it under old business- follow up of Eduardo Vera's policy violations. Did that make it on to the agenda or not?'Mac 'We opened at 7 o'clock- agenda reading- read through the agenda. It was wrote in here, we had no idea what it was. We asked about it during our agenda review at 7 o'clock. Just so you show up in the middle of the night...'
R.G. 'You knew perfectly well what this was about.'
At that point Ricardo left the room visibly disturbed.
Listening carefully to the tape of the meeting (the tape starts 10 minutes before 7:00) reveals that at no time during the meeting was any such agenda item ever read or mentioned.