Restructuring – An A/B Comparison

I’ve gone through the Statutory Bylaws and the Synodical Constitution, done an A/B comparison of the current document with the proposed structure and put the results into the following spreadsheets:

LCC Statutory Bylaws:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1J8rMr3_mIt7cdIMAIpH6cys2QoKGPmhkT-xGECHcYVE/edit?usp=sharing

LCC Synodical Constitution:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YE5CkSFPaEignbKWVKOa9lfec35P1GrbPKPRJdkCjD8/edit?usp=sharing

What was particularly eyebrow raising in the proposal is:

• A significant amount of power is concentrated in the Board,
• The Board has the powers of Synod in Convention,
• The SP and VP are both on the Board and on the Board Executive,
• The Board Executive is a subset of the Board with all the powers of the Board,
• The Executive’s actions can altered or amended by the full Board – though, given that the Executive membership constitutes a significant percentage of the total Board population I would surmise the chance of that actually happening as minimal at best,
• This means that the input and votes of the non-Executive members of the Board will be marginalized,
• As such, the net effect is that LCC’s power will be concentrated in the Board Executive that is largely accountable only to itself.

With respect to holding the SP / VP accountable:

• The Board cannot depose the President or VP they can only “suspend a power of duty” – which I gather is  a fancy way of saying “you can stay in the office but you can’t do this“,
• Except the SP / VP are on the Board, and (to date) I haven’t seen any language that would exclude them from voting on their own deposition,
• which makes this a clear conflict of interest.

Finally:

• Statutory Bylaw Article X – 10.10 states (paraphrased) Immediately following approval of this Bylaw at the Convention … the term of office of each officer shall be deemed to expire on Jan 15, 2018 and the Convention shall elect officers to take office on Jan 15, 2018. 
• Considering that it takes 6 months for constitutional changes to be approved by the member congregations, there’s no way these changes could be passed and come into effect until sometime in April, 2018.
• There’s also the question of the legality of retroactively changing someone’s term of office after they’ve been elected.

See Article X of the Statutory Bylaw for most of the juicy bits.

I know reading the documents made my hair stand on end – it seems we haven’t learned a thing from the ABC mess. 

I consider these documents public domain and you’re free to do with them whatever you wish. Hopefully they can be used to help the membership make informed decisions at the coming convention.