Motion to Amend - Job Description by Committee

[gsteeves]

If a committee drafts a job description and presents a motion to approve it at a business meeting, is it in order for someone to make a motion to amend the actual job description?  Since the motion is to adopt the document, is the content of the document amendable?  Or is only the 'motion to adopt' amendable.

It would seem, on one hand, that the text of the document would be part of the motion and therefore amendable.  On the other hand, it seems like since the document came from a committee, that for the body to amend their document without their consent is a problem.

Help?

[Richard Brown]

The entire document is amendable 

[Joshua Katz]

Agreeing with Mr. Brown, there is no problem presented by amending the committee's recommendation without their consent.  The committee is making a recommendation, and the nature of recommendations is that they might be followed, not followed, or modified.  If the committee says to buy 5 gerbil balls, but the final purchasing decision rests with the assembly, there is nothing keeping the assembly from buying 4 or 6, just as surely as they can buy 5 or none.

[Dan Honemann]

6 hours ago, gsteeves said:

If a committee drafts a job description and presents a motion to approve it at a business meeting, is it in order for someone to make a motion to amend the actual job description?  Since the motion is to adopt the document, is the content of the document amendable?  Or is only the 'motion to adopt' amendable.

It would seem, on one hand, that the text of the document would be part of the motion and therefore amendable.  On the other hand, it seems like since the document came from a committee, that for the body to amend their document without their consent is a problem.

Help?

Although I fully understand your concern that the assembly must not do anything to make its committee appear to have recommended something different from what it has recommended, I don't see how there can be any danger of this happening, and the assembly may, of course, amend this job description in any way it wishes before adopting it.

This is not a case in which an assembly will be considering a motion to adopt the entire report of one of its committees, but rather one in which the assembly will be considering a motion to adopt a document (a job description) which its committee has drafted and is recommending be adopted. As a consequence, what is said in RONR (11th ed.) on pages 509-510 concerning amendment of a committee report which an assembly is called upon to adopt is not directly applicable, but it does shed some light upon the reason for your concerns.