Last night, Chuck Ebert asked about all the fuss over today’s business meeting:
“Can’t we conduct business at star parties and on line? We used to.”
Chuck may not be the only one wondering how a seemingly simple administrative change took on such an oversized life of its own, so here is the story, for those who are interested. It’s a rather recursive mess, somewhat like the famous Abbott & Costello routine, “Who’s On First?” but not as funny.
A few years back, CMAS lost its nonprofit status for purely administrative reasons. At first, we thought, “Who cares?” A few months later, we were denied the donation of a brand-new, $4,000 Celestron C-11 telescope on a GoTo mount, because there would be no tax write-off for the donor’s having given to a nonprofit. Suddenly, we cared. Soon, we found many other reasons for being a nonprofit, and so began the process of becoming a nonprofit once again. This entails re-writing the Bylaws to meet the exacting standards of the Internal Revenue Service. Although the IRS cares far more about financial than administrative issues, we decided to make all updates by-the-book right, which brings us to “Who’s On First?” and second Tuesday nights.
CMAS’s Board of Directors wants to fix an arbitrary restriction in our Bylaws, which allows votes to be taken only on the second Tuesday of a month. The hitch is that we can only vote to change the current Bylaws while following the current Bylaws; so, only on the second Tuesday of a month can we vote to eliminate the requirement that votes be taken only on the second Tuesday of a month! Changing the Bylaws requires a vote of the membership. The conference call allows us to finish this pesky issue today, rather than postpone until next month because of today’s snow storm.
With that background, Chuck is exactly correct: We used to conduct business at star parties and on line, despite that our Bylaws never allowed that, unless, by coincidence, those votes happened to fall on second Tuesdays. If tonight’s vote passes, we will continue to conduct business at star parties and on line, but that will then be okay, because our Bylaws would then allow voting at these other times.
The Board’s intention is that, after this vote passes, we shall hold another business meeting on a weekend, to present to members the many more substantial changes proposed to CMAS’s Bylaws, along with plans for the expansion of Brower Observatory, and operational changes intended to better serve the membership.
