Wendy and I attended the Central Committee meeting on 28 Aug 2010. Someone proposed revising the agenda in order to improve it. In my view the specific changes suggested were good but not significant, but the point of proposing the revisions was to criticize the County Steering Committee (Party Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary and Treasurer + 5 appointees) which was not useful and ended up wasting valuable time. (30 to 45 minutes) In the end the original agenda was adopted so I'm not sure what purpose the exercise served unless it will be a taken as a lesson going forward by the steering committee to improve agendas.
To summarize, four changes to the Bylaws were proposed (click here to see a document with the with additions underlined and deletion struck out). They were all adopted. Below is a description of the discussion.
- Change to finance and budget policies: The bylaw was revised to eliminate an inconsistency. The original version defined the approvals required to spend money and then directed the Central Committee to define these limits for each election cycle. The proposed change eliminated the direction to the Central Committee to define the limits. (they can be changed by a request to change the bylaws). There was little discussion on this one and it was adopted.
- Robert's Rules of Order: This is a new bylaw that says that Robert's will be used as the default rules of order for any meeting of the County GOP. There was some discussion on this but it was not consequential and it was approved almost unanimously.
- Change in the number of CC members required to constitute a quorum (without which business cannot be conducted). The change was to move the number from 35 to 100. There about 560 CC members so this is a little less than 20%. Someone moved that we use a percentage rather than an absolute number. This was rejected when the secretary pointed out that the number of members varies slightly from meeting to meeting (people move, resign, etc) and this would mean that the quorum requirements would need to be recalculated for each meeting. It is much simpler to have a fixed number. Pretty much everyone agreed with that and this change was approved with almost unanimous (if not unanimous) support.
- Clarification to rule regarding county and precinct officers public support of candidates for Republican office. The current rule says that the steering committee members cannot publicly endorse Republican candidates for office if their party candidacy is opposed (primary or convention). The rule was revised to exclude people from criticizing candidates. Evidently, a precinct chair publicly criticized one of the Republican candidates during a primary using his or her title and claimed that this did not violate the rules because he was not endorsing a candidate (only tearing down one). There was a lot of discussion on this for two reasons:
1) Some people felt that the new language added ambiguity for precinct officers. I didn't concur, it seems clear to me. Precinct officers cannot endorse a candidate for nomination when using their title. For example I could not have said that as your precinct chair I encourage you to vote for Morgan Philpot during convention. I could and did say that I personally supported him and encouraged all the delegates I knew to do the same.
2) A number of people did not like the entire bylaw and felt like it should be removed. This has both pros and cons but was out of order because what was being discussed was clarifying the current bylaw. It was suggested that a separate request be sent to the bylaw committee for this action. Evidently this has been discussed in previous Central Committee meetings.
A resolution was proposed and adopted that we encourage our state party leaders to reject the money recently apportioned by the federal government to states to as a bailout for education workers (click here to see the resolution in its entirety). The governor has said that Utah will take the money because, regardless of whether we take it or not, it will get spent and we will just be losing out. I know this may sound a bit Polyanna but I think we should take a stand and say that we as Utahns will not take the money because we think this is not the time for the Federal government to be piling onto the already disastrous debt burden we are carrying. Plus, it can be reasonably argued that this is not a role given to the federal government by the Constitution in the first place. There was not a lot of discussion on this and it was passed again with near unanimity.
One item which as brought up was that you can now register to vote online. Not sure how good an idea this is. Someone pointed out that when an audit of drivers licenses was conducted that 10% of those with licenses are not citizens. But for now it is the way it is.
Some time was spent discussing the county budget and how much money was given to candidates by the county. The elections committee also gave a report on what the county plans were to promote Republican candidates this fall. Real short this involves contacting all county voter (member of all parties or no party affiliation) by the 22nd of Sept. We will be handing out voter registration cards, mail-in voting applications, and a data sheet that has candidate contact info and election related deadlines. If anyone would like to help our precinct with this effort please contact me (hi02.precinct.chair@gmail.com, 801-847-2051).
