CorkyT

We are willing to do whatever it takes to inform the membership of the situation and discuss it. Part of me wants to just allow debate during the motion and forget about what's Robert's Rules approved, but I thought I'd do my due diligence here first. I appreciate everyone's feedback!

I'm interested in this approach. Are you saying that, if something is put on the agenda, then discussion is allowed? There is no emergency on this and there is certainly time to put it on our agenda.

This does not allow for discussing whether or not actually suspending the rules is a good idea though.

Okay, so the key to debating suspending the rules is just having an open discussion about it before any motion is made?

Our organization endorses candidates for certain offices and we have an endorsement committee which makes recommendations to the general members. We have Standing Rules that prohibit us from endorsing for specific offices. A member would like for us to make an exception and include one of these offices for endorsement consideration. How can the membership discuss whether suspending the rules for this 1-time exception is a good idea if it isn't debatable? If the member moves for our endorsement committee to consider the endorsement of one of these prohibited offices, I don't think it can be debated at that time because the motion itself would be out of order.

Thank you. This is the information I needed.

We actually did go into executive session (closed session) where only our voting members were present.

Our membership voted on something that we don't want necessarily want publicized. Of course, we need to record this motion somewhere (eg the minutes) and we do, generally, publicize our business to be transparent. Is there a way to do this other than not publicizing these particular minutes?

Great, thank you for verifying.

Here are the bylaws excerpts: The Chair shall appoint the committee and committee chairs necessary for the work of the organization, with majority approval of the society. The Chair shall be an ex-officio member of all Standing Committees. The Treasurer shall be an ex-officio member of the Finance Committee. and The Finance Committee shall prepare an annual budget at the February meeting to be presented to the society for approval. Someone challenged that the Finance Committee did not exist when it presented the budget proposal in February because no one else was appointed to the Finance committee.

In our society, we have a committee where the Chair and Treasurer are ex-officio members of it. Does the Chair need to actually appoint any more members for the committee to exist and do business? According to references I've read, the Chair does not count for quorum purposes, but other ex-officio members who are members of the society do count for quorum. The Treasurer does satisfy that requirement.