– Richard Kimball
I’ve been a member of ACGS for about two years and President for one and am now reading the CONSTITUTION AND BY-LAWS (adoped in August 2003). If you have not looked at them recently, I sugget that you get a copy – only six uncrowded pages. To save space here, I’m going to assume that you are reading this with a copy of those documents in hand. I’ll not comment on everything, but will indicate Articles by Roman numerals and the Sections by § as in the documents.
ARTICLE I NAME AND PURPOSE
§2-5 Congratulations on incorporation as a Non-Profit. These will need to be watched and renewed or updated as tax law requires or shifts. Are there fees associated with maintaining our tax status?
ARTICLE II MEMBERSHIP
§1 We might want to consider some dues brackets for age, student status, families, 5 or 10 year or lifetime memberships? There are many models for this.
ARTICLE III OFFICERS
§1 Have we rolled the recording and corresponding secretary duties into one? This is a big job. Should we look at this?
§2 The term of each office is one year with two consecutive terms being the limit. Is the webmaster position considered as an officer? Does the same term limiting apply here? Should this be some other kind of “position?”
§5f “Informed” is an extra word
h This makes no sense if the recording and the corresponding secretary are the same person.
§7h Have we already separated out the mail pickup and delivery part of the treasurer’s duties? Should this be part of a corresponding secretary’s duties?
§9 This is illogical as it stands. It needs clarification or elimination.
ARTICLE IV ELECTIONS
§1 The creation of the Nominating Committee is not described and so one must refer to Robert’s Rules of Order. We might be a bit more prescriptive on this in future. Also, it is specified that the new officers will begin at the December meeting. Since we sometimes omit this meeting, perhaps we might change this to have the new officers assume their duties at the next regular meeting to follow the election.
ARTICLE V COMMITTEES
This article was an educational experience for me. Who knew that we have, by our constitution, NINE standing committees? They are: Program, Ways and Means, Public Relations, Hospitality, Editorial, Membership and Circulation, Archives, Queries, and Computer Interest. Since no society officers are to hold standing committee chairmanships and all standing committee chairs are expected to attend all Board of Directors’ Planning meetings, this means that there would be a minimum of 14 in attendance!! Also, all Society members shall serve on at least one committee. The constitution does a nice job of describing the responsibilities of each committee and we actually do most of those things. We do need to discuss some organizational matters here.
ARTICLE VII OFFICIAL PUBLICATION
We need to take a look at this.
The rest of the Constitution looks in line with what we are doing and what we may want to do.
Under the By-Laws:
- We need to change the meeting day, time, and place to conform with what we are actually doing.
- I’m not sure where we should go with regard to the Executive Planning Meeting. I do think that we may be able to adjust so that we have a clearer distinction between Executive Planning Meetings and Genealogical Society Meetings. We tend to run the two together which sometimes causes a Genealogical Society presenter to sit through a long meeting before the presentation of genealogical content and questions and answers of a genealogical nature.
President’s Message, November 2011 by Heather Feuerhelm is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at ac-gs.org.