AFS1970

It may not be null and void depending on your specific language. My old fire department had a class of membership called veteran member. The main requirement was 15 years of membership. It did not define that in any way. We did have a rule about making a certain number of points to remain active but other than being able to vote and not having to pay dues there was no benefit to making your points. Inactive members were still considered members and still accrued time. As dumb as it sounds you could show up after a few years of inactivity and apply for veteran membership, which happened often.

I will start off by saying that I think the decision that was made was well intentioned and probably the best for the organization, but I still think the interpretation was wrong. The by-laws of my fire department provide for an executive board. This is made up of The President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer & Financial Secretary who all serve 1 year terms, the Chief who serves a 2 year term and three members at large who all serve staggered three year terms. One of the requirements to be elected president is to have been previously elected to a term on the executive board. As background, last year we had a member run for an be elected to one of the member at large positions. For some reason we were holding the elections from the bottom up and not from the top down. The President had stepped down and there was an opening, which the vice president does not automatically move up into. This member at large wanted to run for president. Most members thought he had to serve a term to run but he pointed out that the bylaws said elected to and he had just been elected. He was allowed to run and the membership voted for his opponent in a landslide, his opponent turned out to be possibly the worst president an organization could ever have. So this comes and the same member at large is nominated for president. The President is nominated for reelection but failed to meet another requirement and was disqualified. So this member at large who was 1 year into a 3 year term was running unopposed. This is where the interpretation comes in. The executive board who is also the nominating committee and responsible for vetting candidates determined that because most of the terms are 1 year he only needs to serve 1 year to be eligible. I believe that since we have 1, 2 and 3 years terms that a full term would be required, but then again the bylaws simply say elected to a term not completed a term. This was not the only questionable decision by the executive board in this election, but I think they were wrong in their interpretation. Has anyone else dealt with this sort of issue?

So if a member raises such a point of order, and the chair rules it well taken, and it is appealed then what happens? Can the majority vote overrule a bylaw? This seems to be a dangerous situation at best.

The only danger I would see in electing offices out of order is if you have a candidate running for two offices but only able to hold one/ I have seen this before and it seems customary to elect from the top down so that the member who wins a higher office then withdraws from the lower elections. If that member won a lower office then also won a higher office and elected to keep the higher office it would force a special election for the lower office.

I am not sure there is much of a difference. Although if a group wants to use both terms then perhaps the founding members are the ones who had the idea to start the group and the charter members are those that were at the organizational meetings. I have also hear the term charter member used for those that were members when the official charter was issued and have been to a couple of paces where the charter is hung on the wall and contains those names. In my former fire department we had an elderly member who was our last living charter member. When he passed away he was given the same honors as a fire chief.

Well the current salary is zero, so I suppose there could always be a raise. However the requirements that are most problematic can not be solved with money. These are years in the department, having held certain ranks previously, and a residency requirement. No real way to fix these other than to amend them, and that has the potential to bring about other problems.

So basically if the relevant phrase is removed from the bylaws, people will drive through intersections and get hit a lot, regardless of if the now missing stop sign was a custome or a rule. Perhaps removing the stop sign (and by extension the wording in the original question) falls into the category of just because we can do something does not mean we should do something. Although I suppose this could be a case of the stop sign being removed because we installed a traffic light.

Maybe I am reading this wrong, but it seems that the end result will be to have a set of bylaws and no constitution. That being the case, why not repeal the constitution and update the bylaws? This seems less complicated than repealing the bylaws, amending the constitution then renaming the constitution to the bylaws. Another thought is to come up with a completely new title for the resulting document, This might eliminate any confusion between the new document and the historical document. It could be called the rules of operation and procedure or something similar. Unless there is a legal requirement to have the title be something specific.

My city has both career and volunteer fire departments. Trust me I have met just as many career Chiefs who are selected by the government who manage by yelling. The problem with the selection process is not who makes the choice it is the absence of any real criteria. Oddly enough, my new department is one that has some pretty tight requirements for Chief, and the city is trying to push for more (although the reasoning is dubious). The real problem is a lack of candidates that meet the criteria. As for meeting decorum, I have noticed over the years, in fire departments and other organizations that there is a growing lack of knowledge about procedure and decorum. The newest generations don't seem to understand why rules are in place but the older generations don't seem to ever explain the rules or why they exist.

A possible compromise might be a list of names and a preferred contact method. If someone wants to keep their phone number secret but is OK with getting e-mails then so be it. As long as the organization has all the info to contact the membership for official purposes that should suffice.

Since the question is about if specific language is required, and it seems that it is not strictly required, but strongly advised, perhaps the member that is saying it can be removed should just be given that answer.

Our president, I think, is trying to do the job, however he is ill equipped for the position. He has no idea of procedure and has a bit of a language barrier. It is often uncomfortable to listen to him talk or read anything lengthy. Meetings quickly get away from him. Many voted for him as the lesser of two evils, knowing he was filling an unexpired term. He won in a landslide. Still there are a couple of senior members who try to help him get through meetings. His other great quote from the meeting was "If you haven't, you can't" This was a complete sentence (to him) and a statement of policy, despite lacking any actual subject. The Chief is just a guy who yells a lot and tends to take personal offense at anyone who questions him. However there is a time and place for everything and the meeting is not it.

Not sure if it is OK to post a non-question here but I found this sadly funny. As I have posted before I recently joined a new Fire Department, we are very far from following RONR, but have a very detailed By-Laws and an additional Rules Manual. We have a standing agenda item called Good & Welfare. This has the potential to become a gripe session as it allows for anyone to bring up anything they think effects the morale or operation of the department. This is where a good President must be attentive, sadly we do not have one of those. So a member gets up to talk, most of what he said agreed with a previous report of the Chief, then he said something that got the Chief upset and the Chief stood up walked over to the member and started yelling at him and pointing in his face. Lots of members were yelling )to be heard over the Chief) that the president should do something. Finally I was able to be heard and I called out :point of order" my intention was to ask the president if the first member still had the floor. However I don't think the president knew what a point of order was, so he just banged his gavel and yelled out "order, order, order". To be fair he accomplished the same thing but I can't help but laugh that. There were other problems but not as funny as this misunderstanding?

Although likely too late for this year, because it would require a by laws change,, I may have a solution. I was in a political organization that has to send a large number of delegates to a state convention. The number changes every time but is usually around 23. The solution was slates of candidates. There is a candidates committee that assembles one slate, and then any member can propose a slate from the floor. All slates have to be for the full number of delegates. The only odd thing is that an individual candidate can be on multiple slates. I once found myself on two opposing slates, so I knew I was elected either way.

Just curious reading this thread, has this situation happened with different candidates in different years or is this one person who keeps running this type of campaign?

I will have to check, but I believe the requirements are to hold office. The wisdom of such a move is questionable at best, and might just be pointless. The requirement in question is years of service. For that position you need to have been a member for 5 years. The member only had 4 years at the time. This may have already become a moot point and certainly would be by the next election in June. As near as I can tell not many members cared at the time but now have found this officer to be inadequate so there has been some discussion, although most people seem to already think nothing can be done. The only thing I can say for certain is that these requirements may need to be revisited, although I am not familiar with their history or reasoning so I am not the one to try that task.

I recently joined a new volunteer fire department. I have been a member less than a year. I used to be in abother department for 13 years. We have some well detailed but somewhat cumbersome rules. However it appears as our by laws were violated about 6 months ago but nobody raised a point of order at the time. I am wondering if it is too late to do so. We have two types of officers, executive and operational. The executive side runs the organization and the operational side commands at emergencies. There are various requirements for operational officers that increase with rank. It is the job of the executive officers to determine that all nominees for operational office are qualified. In May a member was nominated for lieutenant, the executive board made no objection to the nomination. In June when the elections were about to be held the executive board was asked about qualifications for a different nominee for a different lieutenant position. Their reply was that they had not met with the Chief to get the information they needed and thus they had no way of telling who was or was not qualified. Both of those two nominees were running unopposed so the presiding officer said that there was no point in delaying their election. Both of those nominees were elected, by the secretary casting one ballot. An objection was raised from the floor about another candidate for lieutenant not having one qualification. He was questioned abut this by the presiding officer and it was determined that he could not be nominated for that position. Now it turns out that the first member I wrote about also lacked a qualification for office, although a different one. It also looks like several members and officers on both the executive and operational sides knew about this issue. I was not a voting member at the time so I could not bring it up. Is it too late to bring up this problem, next month which will be 6 months into a 1 year term? I have asked some other members but everyone seems to think that if the membership voted than the election has to stand even though the member was never qualified to run in the first place.

I still consider myself very much a student, sometimes with only enough knowledge of parliamentary procedure to be dangerous. This is one reason why I joined the forum and have asked a few questions. My first introduction was in a social / charitable organization that met quarterly. The year before there had been a fairly complete revision of the bylaws. At the annual meeting a new president was elected from the membership. At the next quarterly meeting that new president submitted 5 proposed bylaws changes. There was some objection on the authority of the president to revise the bylaws. It was one member’s opinion that since they were revised last year they were clearly perfect and should not be revised or amended until the next required revision in ten years. This debate was tiring but got me hooked. It ended up with the president relinquishing the chair and then getting recognized as a member by the vice president and making his proposals as a member. This all ended up with the postponing of all five proposals until the next quarterly meeting and the board of directors calling in an outside arbitrator to preside over the next meeting, multiple people standing and debating what was on various pages of various different books all claiming to be Robert's Rules. That is what made me go and buy my first copy of RONR. Fast forward a few years, I was a member of a union at work, and realized that our union rarely followed it's won bylaws and that some of those bylaws were somewhat out of date. The president appointed me parliamentarian, but I think he thought that would shut me up. I ended up chairing a bylaws revision committee in the union and things went smoothly until that union disbanded a few years later. Looking back on it now, I realize what a poor choice I was for the position. I have since been in a few other organizations, now I am the president of the board of directors for my condominium association and a member of a local town committee for a political party. Through those bodies I have been involved with amending or revising bylaws and other related documents, namely political resolutions and Standard Operating Procedures in a volunteer fire department which referenced different sections of the bylaws depending on the subject. I even got to try my hand at researching and writing an ethics policy once although that proved to be quite a handful. I don't think I ever would have been involved in any of this had I not be to that first contentious society meeting.