Next BRC meeting - Sunday, September 13 @ 1-3pm

[Scott Forbes]

Hi all,

It looks like Sunday, September 13 from 1-3pm is the most popular time on the Doodle poll, although only six committee members took the poll (and we’ll need nine to make quorum). Among other items, we need to discuss:

• At our February 2020 meeting, the BRC voted recommendations on the floor amendments to the bylaws that were made at the February 2019 PCO meeting and then referred to the BRC. We had intended to send these recommendations to the Exec Board for consideration at their March 2020 meeting, but that meeting was canceled due to the pandemic, and then the following months were a scramble to adopt rules for virtual meetings and then hold virtual endorsement meetings.
• Two of the recommendations we made at our February 2020 meeting conflict with each other: We recommended a set of amendments to clean up Sections 8.3.3 and 8.3.6 of the bylaws, and separately recommended approving a Chris Roberts floor amendment (Amendment #5) to strike Section 8.3.3 in its entirety. We need to resolve this conflict.
• The Endorsements Committee also has changes they’d like to the BRC to consider and/or recommend with regard to Section 8.3 of the bylaws, especially with regard to:
• Clarifying the Endorsements Committee’s role with regard to recommending whether KCDCC should endorse candidates in a single-LD race who have been endorsed by the LD. 
• Preventing situations where the Exec Board endorses a candidate in a race while the Endorsements Committee is still considering other candidates.
• Potential revisions to the endorsement rules to clarify whether a motion to Reconsider is in order after a motion to endorse a candidate fails.
• We need to update the rules we adopted for conducting virtual meetings to reflect our current practices. Among other things, our current rules prohibit virtual guests, which I think has turned out to be unnecessary, and they don’t really reflect our use of “yes/no” icons for tallying votes. I’ve drafted a set of proposed updates for review at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O_PWAzuS17Mn7jMh7MpDmOvGRz2b9nNp9vZTjPF_YIE/edit.
• We need to work on rules and logistics for the 2020 KCDCC reorg meeting. Among other items:
• We need to adopt rules for virtual elections. We probably don’t need to write rules for virtual elections, as several of our sister organizations appear to have already done so, but we need to identify and recommend a set that works for our needs.
• We need to decide, explicitly and in advance, whether the reorg meeting agenda will include a motion to adopt bylaws and how it will be handled if a slate of candidates shows up at the reorg meeting with their own set of proposed bylaws or amendments. Several exciting precedents were set when this scenario unfolded in 2018, and there are even some new rules in the just-released 12th Edition of Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised that are relevant to this exact scenario, so it’d be worth having the BRC review and consider this as a hypothetical rather than putting ourselves in the position of reacting.
• For the record I’m not aware of any candidate or slate that is planning to show up at the reorg meeting with yet another set of bylaws, and one would hope that the bylaws we spent hundreds of hours rewriting in January and February 2019 have a shelf life that’s a little longer than 20 months… but I’d rather we not be caught flat-footed if history repeats.
• Alternatively, or in conjunction with the reorg meeting, we need to decide whether a February bylaws meeting we should be a regular biannual thing. Giving the newly elected officers time to settle in and decide whether they’d like to propose any bylaws changes may make more sense than having the outgoing BRC propose bylaw changes at reorg, and a February meeting may also give KCDCC an opportunity to engage the PCOs and get them involved once all the committees have spun up and started looking for volunteers. On the other hand, meetings suck.
• One of my goals in life is for the KCDCC reorg meeting to take less than two hours, so I’d like to discuss an agenda order that minimizes the time spent waiting between elections. Some of KCDCC’s elections require knowing the outcome of a previous election (e.g., we need to know the gender of the County Chair to determine who’s eligible to run for First Vice-Chair), but it may be possible to queue up candidate speeches for Treasurer or State Committee Members while we’re tallying votes.
• Given our online meeting format, we may want to consider whether candidates should be allowed (or required) to prerecord their speeches.
• Anything else I’ve left out or forgotten. 

I’ve invited Rick and Benton from the Endorsements Committee to join us, and as always BRC meetings are “open to the public,” so please feel free to forward the notice to other Endorsements Committee members or interested parties.

Talk to you Sunday!

— Scott

[Scott Forbes]

Forgot to include one minor detail: The bridge number. https://zoom.us/j/2063690284

[Ted Barker]

Hi Scott,

Sorry I missed the poll but i WILL make the meeting Sunday.

Thanks,

Ted Barker
206.954.7755

On Sep 9, 2020, at 11:12 PM, Scott Forbes <sc...@scottforbes.net> wrote:

--
KCDCC Bylaws and Rules Committee - Public Mailing List
Committee members may post by sending email to brc-...@googlegroups.com.
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "King County Democrats - Bylaws and Rules Committee" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to brc-span+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/brc-span/AD9A4F8C-9FC5-4411-8B77-E8EB43F71F4C%40scottforbes.net.

[Jamila Taylor]

Hi All,

I am unable to attend today's meeting.  

Jamila

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/brc-span/2E97C36D-65E1-48C5-BEDD-1FEA925B4107%40comcast.net.

--

Jamila Taylor (pronounced JAH-MEE-LAH)

Attorney & Consultant

Phone: (206) 486-5493 | Fax: (206) 374-2374