AFS1970

Our current bylaws do not define what good standing is, but we do use RONR as our parliamentary authority, We have very detailed discipline and appeals in the bylaws as well as provisions for terminations of membership. However to the best of my knowledge we do not use RONR for discipline. From reading other threads here, it seems that many organizations use wording similar to a member in good standing is not currently under discipline. Our main form of punishment is suspension. We do not define what rights are suspended during this period. However the bylaws do say that if an appeal is successful the member is returned to good standing. Now our requirements for office require specific lengths of time (years) of consecutive good standing. Does this means that a suspension restarts the clock for years of consecutive good standing? Our fire chief is required to have seven years, does this mean a suspension six months ago means he can not run for another six and a half years? We are having trouble coming to a consensus on this. However the use of the word "currently" in some bylaws seems to be the biggest problem to me.

I have dealt with this in two fire departments. and both had similar provisions for vacancies. If your Bylaws don't have one they probably should. In my old department for line officers, everyone moved up one rank and the vacancy was filled by special election to the lowest rank. For Executive officers the vice president moves up and the special election is for vice president. My current department is basically the same, except that due to increasing requirements for higher ranks (among the line officers) it specifically says all officers move up to the next position they are qualified for and the lowest opening is filled by special election. Most departments I have seen have some similar provision to these. However ultimately it will be up to your VFD to address this in accordance with your bylaws or your parliamentary authority (usually RONR)

Thanks for all the help, as we undertake the revision we are finding a number of small areas that need updating. We of course can only fix the matter of odd interpretations by changing who we elect to interpret these bylaws. Funny that the example you mention if Connecticut Certified First Grade Firefighter II, as that certification does not exist and never has existed. Based on the requirements for other officers we think it is a typo combining Certified Connecticut Firefighter II (a professional certification) and First Grade Firefighter (which is a class of membership). We are generally lucky in that there are only 3 main areas that need extensive updating. The rest of the bylaws just need cleaning up from typos and clarifying some odd language/grammar choices. We are actually bringing an amendment to the Article that addresses officer qualifications forward tomorrow night instead of waiting for the full revision to be presented because of the urgency of the matter. We may do this with one other section but we might get done with the proposed full revision before we need to fix that.

The title is just eligibility for the position. It seems based on this and other officer positions that the custom (or previous interpretation) has been that these are eligibility to be elected. In my short time here I have never seen anyone else become ineligible in mid term, so I suspect it is something we have never had to deal with. As for a longer quote, I am not sure it will help but here it is: Section 1: The Chief of the Company shall be elected at the Annual Meeting of the Company and shall hold office for a term of two (2) years or until his successor has been elected. a. Shall have served for at least one (1) complete term in each of the grades of officers or shall have previously served as Chief, Assistant Chief or Captain. b. Shall have been a member in good standing for a minimum of seven (7) consecutive years c. Shall be Connecticut Certified First Grade Firefighter II d. Shall be a minimum of 21 years old e. Shall live within two (2) linear miles of the Glenbrook Fire District f. Shall have served at least one (1) complete term as an Executive Board Member g. Shall be an expert in Fire Equipment Operations and Fireground Deployment. I agree that most of this is likely to fall on the side of us interpreting our own bylaws. My main question was about the president's interpretation of extending the term, which I think is questionable at best. However I have found on this forum that since everyone has been a part of multiple organizations even on the interpretation questions there is usually some good advise given.

Wow, thanks for all the replies, this has given me much to think about. So as to if the requirements are to be elected or to serve, well they actually never use either of these words. Article VII, Section 1 is titled Eligibility Requirements for the position of Chief. it says …"shall hold office for a term of two (2) years or until his successor has been elected. It then proceeds to list 7 other requirements (a-g), which includes e. Shall live within two (2) linear miles of the Fire District." Now I should say that none of us are trying to declare the chief's position vacant, the bylaws committee is in fact trying to amend the bylaws so he remains eligible. However a previous attempt at that failed largely due to our vice president who spoke at length against it and was actually the first to suggest the chief could continue to serve indefinitely. I think most members voted against the measure since they thought the chief could just continue on. Now to further complicate matters, I have found two other relevant sections. First a section on nominations and elections which includes the following language: "The President shall at the start of elections advice attending members eligible voters present and any ineligible candidates." I realize there are spelling and grammatical errors in that section. As near as I can tell it means he should advise the attending members of who are the eligible voters and any candidates that have been determined to be ineligible. Second is a section on filling of vacancies that says "if the position of Chief should become vacant, said vacancy shall be acted upon at the next regular meeting of the company. A special election shall be held within 30 days and nominations shall be made for the position at the meeting at which the vacancy was acted upon." It does not say anything about how the position is determined to be vacant. So we have our work cut out for us.

I changed this from a TLDR post. When a rule says that someone serves a term or until their successor is elected, is that indefinitely or is there some sort of time limit when this has to be revisited? Also if someone is eligible when elected but then becomes ineligible does this become effective immediately or at the end of a term? I ask these because our fire chief moved outside of the residency requirements in the middle of his term of office. Our president & vice president declared at the time that he could remain in office because the bylaws say he serves a two year term or until his successor is elected and since we had not elected a replacement he could stay. I am of the opinion that the position would have had to be declared vacant in order to nominate a successor so they effectively blocked that from happening. However now the two years is up and nominations are approaching. We can not nominate the chief for reelection because he is not eligible. The president has said this doesn't matter because he can continue to serve until we elect his successor. I can't imagine that we inadvertently elected a chief for life a couple of years ago. I also wonder what happens if an eligible candidate is nominated for chief and the current chief can't run against them?

Without knowing the start time of the meeting, I may be a bit off base here. A meeting that starts at 12:00 and adjourns at 4:30 is very different than one that starts at 3:30 and adjourns at 4:30. However assuming that sufficient time is generally available for the business at hand, but this meeting is expected to take longer than usual, couldn't the chair simply rule the motion to adjourn at 4:30 as out of order?

Out of curiosity, why isn't it a good idea?

We, like a lot of organizations tend to do things somewhat informally much of the time. Although we are a lot less formal than my former department. I get the idea that our president doesn't know much about parliamentary procedure but is also not open to assistance. The committee members were not even told they were appointed. It looks like one of the sons pushed for the first meeting, and his father told him who to text, from what I heard he said I was a maybe and the girlfriend was a no. I have no idea why the other member who volunteered was not appointed. This all seems to be legal but a bit irregular. On of the big reasons for this revision is the rumor of many missing amendments. Apparently as amendments have been passed, they were kept with meeting minutes and never put into a cop of the bylaws. lots of people have memories of amendments but finding if these are accurate will take going through monthly minutes for many years. Because of this my suggestion was to start almost from scratch with new bylaws. I see 3 as a good quorum out of 5, as long as all 5 had the opportunity to be present. We have only had the one meeting so far, so there is room for improvement.

Thanks for the quick reply. Our bylaws are silent on how committee chairs are picked. As for reasonable time, this is one of the few committees that holds formal meetings so we really have nothing to go with in that regard. I suspected that there was no reason so many family members could be appointed, especially with them all being members of the department. As for the member that was not notified, he says he was not but one of the sons says he sent him a text message about it. Either way we will work with what we have. I doubt this committee will accomplish anything at all. Plus we will have some more pressing issues with bylaws in the next few months as we approach nominations and elections.

My Volunteer Fire Department has finally formed a by laws revision committee. This will hopefully solve a few problems with our current by laws including the fact that nobody has a complete current copy. However the way the committee has been appointed and is operating is raising some questions. 1) The President (who appoints all committees unless otherwise specified) has appointed himself to this committee and is acting as chairman. In most other associations I have been in the President can't serve on committees because he has oversight of those committees. None of the available bylaws we have say anything about this, although it could be a custom. 2) The president called for volunteers then appointed 5 out of the 7 volunteers. Of the 5, two are his sons. I am another and the final member is probably our best versed in bylaws and parliamentary matters. 1 of the members who was turned down is the girlfriend of one of his sons and the two do not have a good rapport outside of the department. 3) There has so far been 1 meeting. It was called the day before and I was unavailable due to work. The other non family member was in the station and was not told the meeting was going on so he did not attend. Thus the meeting was just the President and his two sons. To be fair they are not always in agreement with him but it just looks bad to quite a few members. So the issue / questions are 1) is this a properly appointed committee? 2) Does the large number of family members make a conflict of any sort? Is there any requirement for how long in advance a committee meeting is called?

Thanks. I had heard somewhere that the house used RONR (or at least a previous version) and the senate used Jefferson's manual.

I always thought that the house did function under RONR. They have their own separate rules?

I may be wrong on this one but I think that once intermixed the two types of ballots can't effectively be separated. On subsequent votes, if they are counted as not changed, but a candidate drops out, wouldn't any AB's for that candidate count as write in votes for the candidate? Seems it might not change the results noticeably. Probably one reason why RONR says not to intermix.

Without knowing your bylaws, it would seem to me that if these positions are appointed by the president and you are running for president, baring a specific provision otherwise such appointments end with the presidential term. Thus you can likely appoint anyone (even an incumbent) you see fit to appoint.

I may be using the term slate wrong, our executive board acts as a nominating committee and puts forward one candidate (unless they can't find one) for each office, however we still elect each office separately. Last year they only came up with 2 out of 3 candidates for members at large of their own body and of those two, one was also running for President. This seems to be less about a power grab then the membership seeing the incumbent board (who generally nominate themselves) as having more knowledge in this area but still holding the right to nominate someone against their chosen candidate. That being said, in my short time in the organization I have found them to be largely clueless about who should and should not hold office. As for a candidate that nobody wants, we don't always have enough candidates to have any real opposition for most offices. Often we get people nominated for multiple offices so they decline the lower ones once they win the higher ones. The end result is that people may not get as high up the ladder as they want but they usually stay in office and sometimes get promoted without even trying. This year the candidate nobody seems to want got nominated for a promotion by the executive board, nominated themselves for two other positions, and only got seconds because the president waited a long time and people thought the meeting would not move on if someone didn't second the nomination. Then of course another custom (see below) kicked in and this member was nominated for 5 our of 7 positions. Two of the other candidates were really bad and didn't get enough votes to even be considered competition. As for a cluttered process, we have another odd custom, which I didn't believe until I saw it happen. It makes no sense to me, and serves for a very cluttered balloting process. We have 7 officers, Someone invariably moves that all nominees for office also be nominated for all lower offices. This means for the lowest office we have at least 7-9 nominees until we start getting them to decline as they win higher offices. Thanks for the quick answer pof yes we can do it. Now the real art comes into play of should we do it.

Almost every organization I have been involved with, even those that claim to follow RONR have required seconds to nominations, as well as generally not allowing for self nomination. I myself only found out within the last year or so that RONR does not require a second for a nomination. My current organization has the custom of requiring a second except for the slate proposed by the executive board. Self nomination has also not been the custom. Last year we had someone nominate themselves for several positions and have a great deal of trouble getting a second but finally got the second. This year there has been much talk about a bylaws amendment that would ban self nomination and require a second. My general feeling is that this is a knee jerk reaction to try and prevent this member from running for office. They have proven to be a very unpopular and largely inactive and ineffective officer. However I am generally against making a rule that seems to be for or against a single individual. So the question is, can an organization adopt such a change that goes directly against RONR while still attempting to follow RONR is most other rules? I have seen many bylaws that say they follow RONR unless otherwise specified but this seems to me to be a big conflict. I am not sure which way I would personally vote on such an amendment, simply because I have dealt with one way traditionally but have come to understand the reasoning behind RONR doing it another way.

I agree that this is all very confusing, but I would add another monkey wrench in that is say the President may call board meetings during the annual meeting but not that they need to be held during that meeting. So I suppose he could call for the board to meet monthly as long as he issues that schedule while the annual meeting is in session. As for the board's power in between meetings I initially took this to mean they could run the affairs in between the annual meetings, but I think it could just as well mean in between the periodic and potentially sparse board meetings.

Must be sent is always better than must receive, especially if things are time sensitive. Apart from parliamentary matters, I saw a form at a doctor's office that asked for contact preferences and included mail, e-mail, text message, phone call and I think even social media message. I wish I had asked for a copy of the form because it is an issue with our condo association. We actually allow for telegrams to be sent but not e-mails.

From what others are saying it sounds like what you are calling Standing Rules may in fact be By Laws. It also seems to me that they need to be revised. I would suggest that such a revision contains language to address two things, first the creation of new committees including who creates them and who appoints them. Second how committees are disbanded when a program at the school ends.

I know a second is not required for a nomination in RONR, although most associations I have experience with do seem to require them. I suspect this is more out of ignorance than any organizational need. Personally I have more of a problem with self nomination, than not requiring a second, as I think it is somewhat unseemly to nominate oneself. This year the Executive board proved they are completely clueless about the active membership in a number of their nominations. I think getting rid of their slate may be what is needed, although this year I am a member at large of the Executive Board. Maybe I can have some positive impact.

Thank you, I agree that we need to adopt a parliamentary authority. I suspect that this will be an uphill battle. So far this year there have been 4 or 5 attempts to amend the bylaws and all have failed. With the exception of one they were all fairly short and pretty straight forward, and all had a surprising number of members speak against them. For whatever reason the membership does not seem to like making changes. Seeing that a custom does not ever become a rule, can one appeal to such a custom in a meeting? Without the parliamentary authority I would think that the custom might hold at least as much weight as rules that we are not actually bound to. Although I expect that the debate would be between which custom do we appeal to.

I have read a little bit here about an organizations customs being kind of unwritten but generally understood policies, but does a custom even become a rule if it is not written down? I am thinking it does not, but I just don't know. So more fun from my fire company meetings. First we had an issue with nominations, which we have almost no written rules for. Apparently the custom has been for nomination by another member and a second by a different member. Lots of organizations do it this way. The executive Board also nominates 1 member for each office but their nominations do not require a second. They serve as a nominating committee but are not named as such. This year we had a member nominate herself for several offices. She was only seconded for two offices and that was after a few minutes of dead silence. Then another odd tradition kicked in. A member made a motion to nominate all candidates for office for all lower offices. This leads to a great deal of people nominated for the lowest office. So two customs were questioned in between the nominations and elections. 1 was self nomination. Our executive board thought this was not allowed but as we had no rule appealed to RONR and found that it was allowed. However the second thing was the executive board saying we had to follow RONR because the bylaws required it. Turns out this is also an unwritten custom, as we have no parliamentary authority listed. So I wonder does our custom of not allowing self nomination stand due to it being followed longer than any current member can remember? Does our parliamentary authority stand despite having no written rule to appeal to RONR? It seems to me that these two customs are inadvertently in conflict with each other. Have either or neither become a rule?

No objection to the candidate was made this year. He was elected unopposed, because the incumbent did not post a letter of intent in time and they were the only candidates.

I agree that the precedent was set last year. Although I am not sure it was set correctly. I left out that the president was set by a member at large who was presiding over the meeting made a ruling based on the wording. I am not sure he had the authority to do so but I think he got the technical wording part of it right. That is why I am not sure that there was even a need to evaluate the definition of term this year. I think they got it wrong but probably didn't need to even make a decision this year. I have only been a member here for a year and a half. My old firehouse had much less confusing rules. However I don't want to always be the guy bringing up rules clarifications as I am so new. So the rules for President are: Article IX Section 1 Eligibility: To be eligible to hold the offices of President or Vice-President, a member must have served as an active member for two (2) years and be at least 21 years of age. No member shall be eligible to hold the office of President who has not been elected to at least one term as Executive Board Member. Article XIII, Section 5, #17 In the interest of accountability to the members of the fire company, all candidates running for President, Fire Chief and Assistant Fire Chief shall provide a list of their proposed plans for managing the Fire Company and its resources. This list shall be posted at least 20 days prior to the Annual (June) Meeting on the official Company bulletin board. Failure to provide such list will automatically disqualify the candidate from that position(s).