Dear Friend of Liberty,
I am contributing $250 to help defray the cost of rescheduling a Libertarian National Committee (LNC) meeting and I’d like to ask for your help as well.
Allow me to explain.
Twenty-six people from around the country serve as LNC members or alternates. The LNC is the board of directors of the national Libertarian Party and I’m the Chairman.
LNC members and officers like me are not paid. We are volunteers. We pay for our own flights and hotel rooms out of pocket to attend three to four meetings per year. Serving on the LNC for a two-year term costs each LNC member like me at least three thousand dollars out of pocket.
This past weekend the LNC was supposed to meet in Dallas, but Dallas, like much of the nation, was hit by a winter storm.
Too many people’s flights were cancelled which would have prevented us from being able to reach a quorum, so we had to cancel the meeting at the last minute.
Unfortunately, we did not know in advance we were going to have to cancel the meeting. In fact, nine people had already boarded flights bound for Dallas and a some made it all the way.
People who made it part of the way or even all the way to Dallas include: Dianna Visek of Illinois, Rich Tomasso of New Hampshire, Tim Hagan and Brett Pojunis of Nevada, Starchild and Scott Lieberman of California, Michael Cloud from Arizona, Vicki Kirkland of Florida, Sam Goldstein of Indiana. (Sorry if I missed someone.)
So far, American Airlines and the Hyatt where we were scheduled to meet have been very good about re-booking our flights with minimal extra expense. Unfortunately, the people who actually made it to Dallas instead of getting their flights cancelled have to buy new tickets for our meeting which is rescheduled for next weekend at the Hyatt Regency DFW Airport. Our meetings are open to members, and the meeting details are here.
This meeting is important, and it’s where we will set our 2014 budget.
Altogether our board members will probably incur an extra $4,000 total in expenses for having to reschedule this meeting.
I was lucky and was able to reschedule my travel without incurring any extra charges. But I am contributing $250 to help defray the cost to other members who were not so lucky.
I hope you’ll consider pitching in to help defray their costs as well. We set up a fund for this specific purpose.
If we raise more than needed, the excess will go into our general fund.
Click here to donate.
With warmest regards,
LNC Chair Geoffrey Neale
Geoffrey Neale, Chair
Libertarian National Committee, Inc.
Well, yeah, but wouldn’t it be fun to have the whole convention have a standing vote on whether the 2014 budget being changed to cover this reimbursement should be upheld?
To be fair Lieberman may have a claim for detrimental reliance whereassome other people you are alluding to have no case at all.
Yes, the judiciary committee needs to consider that. Followed by a lawsuit, appeals, and 60+ IPR articles.
Marc, Are you really expecting an answer to that question?
You expect that you will occasionally have really bad weather,
Hmmm…. The real question is whether it’s worth $1500 to have Lieberman’s opinion on a few questions.
There’s no if about it. He has submitted them, and furthermore says that if the directed fundraising does not raise enough money it should be taken out of the 2014 budget. As of this writing he hasn’t answered which budget line(s) it should be taken out of.
Further explanation from Scott Lieberman:
Mr. Linnabary:
I flew on Southwest. They don’t have first class or business class. From the little bit of research I did, the circa $940 for
San Jose-Las Vegas- San Antonio and Dallas-Albuquerque-Los Angeles-San Jose one-way flights that are booked less than 14 hours before flight time is not at all unreasonable.
I don’t use Expedia because I don’t do red eyes, and “pot luck” flights do not fit into my work schedule.
$34 for an Amtrak ticket is hardly “cushy”, and I purposely booked a hotel across the street from the Amtrak station in San Antonio to make sure I did not have to pay a cab fare on Friday morning to get to the railroad station.
As I said in my previous e-mail, I was obviously not going to bill the Party because I decided to fly in a day early to make sure I got to Dallas by Friday evening. I am only billing the Party because of the timing of the cancellation of last weekend’s LNC Session.
I am attending the make-up LNC Session this weekend and I am not billing the party anything at all for it, because I was not charged a change fee for my flights.
Scott Lieberman
Starchild – I am sorry that you are out hundreds of dollars because of your wasted flights.
If you had been “lucky enough” to make it to the Hyatt Regency DFW, you would have seen why your suggestions above were not workable.
It was essentially impossible to get any kind of transportation from the Hyatt to anywhere else.
The light rail was not running.
Super Shuttle was not running.
I don’t feel under any kind of moral obligation to spend $40 on a cab ride to another hotel to save $40 off the Hyatt’s $99 per night group rate. That is – if you could have even gotten a cab. They were in very short supply on Friday and Saturday. The roads were a mess – the overpasses had one to two inches of ice on their roadways.
The differences between a mandatory Registration Fee for our Conventions and getting expense reimbursement for a cancelled LNC Session:
1. Delegates have 2 years to save the money for the $80 or so Registration Fee. I had about 12 hours to decide if I wanted to make sure I got to Dallas, or did not get to Dallas. By the way – Mr. Pojunis was originally scheduled to arrive at Noon on Saturday, and as far as we know Ms. Capozzi was not going to attend. So I have every right to make sure our Region is fully represented.
2. Delegates are not attending two Libertarian National Conventions on two successive weekends. If I want to represent my Region at this weekend’s LNC Session, I am being forced to shell out money for two successive trips to Dallas, TX. I can’t imagine that any of our members think that LNC members should be forced to suffer financially for travelling twice in
two weekends to attend board meetings.
I did think of asking my Region for at least partial reimbursement, but then I realized that no one in my Region was responsible for the timing of the cancellation notice. That responsibility for that falls on the national Libertarian Party.
Scott Lieberman
If you agree that I have a right to know which airline I am flying on before I purchase a ticket, the cheapest Expedia fare for
San Jose to DFW round trip as of 9:24pm PST today for this coming weekend (leaving Thursday or Friday), is $556 or $622, not the $331 that Mr. Linnabary describes above.
That Expedia fare is still cheaper than the circa $950 for my one way trip flights, but the difference is not nearly as dramatic as the difference that Mr. Linnabary intimated with his e-mail above.
Scott Lieberman
If Starr Chamber Lieberman submits those receipts, he should be kicked out of the LP for pure fiscal malfeasance. Virgin America from San Jose to DFW via LAX for $556 round trip after a 2-minute search on Kayak.
There have been many other winter meetings, including in colder places and this is the first time I ever remember this happening. Dallas is usually not that bad in the winter BTW.
Not a solution in this case since the LNC is not empowered to change the bylaws. But the good news is more LNC members are speaking up in favor of this change, so maybe it will happen at this convetion.
If you schedule a meeting in Winter, what did you expect?
Jill Pyeatt: ” There was no good solution here.”
A good solution would be to have meetings over videoconferencing, that way people don’t have to run around the country for these things.
It really is a shame that so many people were so terribly inconenienced and lost money last weekend, but I don’t think that Neale did the wrong thing. If half the people expected couldn’t make it, he had a dicision to make. There was no good solution here.
Dr Lieberman is an alternate regional representative to the LNC. As an alternate, his presence is not required unless the representative he is the alternate for indicates that he is not planning on attending the meeting. It is rare for his region’s representative to fail to attend. In fact, I believe he has not missed a meeting in the three plus years he has served.
Travel agents still exist? In other news:
Has anyone tried to talk to a travel agent and see about getting some sort of deal since the LP does require people to travel?
Regardless of whether it’s a good idea to have in person meetings or not, and regardless of whether it’s a good idea to advertise the LP this way (without even trying to explain why we have in-person meetings), I hope people like Vicki that are having to go to Dallas twice don’t get stuck with the bill.
Luckily for me both greyhound and the hotel changed me over to the following weekend at no extra charge. If the bus had run to Dallas I probably would have just stayed there all week, although probably not at the conference hotel.
As an LNC member on a fixed income, I would certainly appreciate any reimbursement help that I can get. I made it all the way to the hotel and had to stay Friday night. I was able to cancel my reservation for Saturday night without a penalty, but had to pay extra on my airfare to fly back
to Orlando Saturday afternoon. I will be going back to Dallas this weekend with my airfare increased due to the short notice. I realize noone is obligated to chip in, but I will be greatful to anyone who does.
Having served on the LNC as an alternate and attended meetings that seemed to be wasting my time, I would still be embarrassed to ask for money to cover travel exigencies.
I’m not. Please everyone send me money 🙂
(and yes I do mean that).
But I do think it’s a little embarrassing to have the party officially begging the world for help with this. Granted, I’m not one of the people that got stuck going to Dallas two weeks in a row, but even then I would have preferred to hit everyone here up on my own rather than have the party blog it on the national website, email it to our whole email list, spread over our social networks, etc.
Even if I were more convinced of the need for in-person meetings I would hopefully be more cognizant that it is not something that is easy to explain to non-insiders and that publicly asking anyone and everyone (including first time visitors to LP.org just checking out the party for the first time) for help with this is terrible PR and just begs for the kind of comments we got on facebook and here.
On the other hand, http://www.lp.org/reschedulefund is at $2,752.33 out of a goal of 4k, so it seems to be working fairly well on the cash side if one is not worried about the PR side.
If I had some spare change in my pocket and was not on the LNC, I may have responded to the request with a note that I would donate if the party would livestream the meeting. I’d have liked to see what I’m helping pay for.
As it is, I won’t apply to the fund – on my end it was only a very minor inconvenience of a couple of extra trips to the greyhound station, an extra round of packing and partially unpacking my bags, and a couple of extra calls and emails. Other people who actually made it all or part of the way to Dallas were a lot more inconvenienced..
Having served on the LNC as an alternate and attended meetings that seemed to be wasting my time, I would still be embarrassed to ask for money to cover travel exigencies. A nimble, effective group could overcome these problems without the legalistic stances and localized blithering.
Well, the LNC appoints many of the members of those other committees, as well as hires an ED and oversees staff, so it’s all of a piece.
The effect on the LNC was secondary.
The rule was obviously written to manipulate the Bylaws and Platform committees.
Having walked in the shoes, I see many new ways for even more control of board members and an even more dysfunctional process.
Meetings are necessary. Personal interaction is in our best interest.
Step one: send emails to [email protected], it will be easier to get a bylaw changed if the bylaws committee passes it as a recommendation.
I agree with both of those goals. Let’s organize to make them happen.
Marc is correct… the delegates passed the bylaws and it is up to delegates to fix this. Perhaps while fixing it they can make meetings more transparent while making them easier to hold simultaneously.
I think some folks here need to walk a mile in the shoes of others.
The **delegates** put the must-meet-in-person constraints on the LNC. You don’t like it, be a delegate and change the rule.
Great minds think alike.
Jed said: ” I just see a perverse sense of irony when a group of people whose ideology is based on the notion that there are too many laws, wastes time and energy bickering about bylaws.”
I’ve been saying this also for years!
They abolutely should be (other than executive session, which would require a higher level login).
I just see a perverse sense of irony when a group of people whose ideology is based on the notion that there are too many laws, wastes time and energy bickering about bylaws.
TK
That stein never had beer in it in the first place. They were adding more piss to the stein of piss they gave you already.
Quoth Jed Ziggler:
“This is what frustrates me about the LP: to hell with bylaws, use common sense!”
Setting aside bylaws in favor of common sense is an exercise that relies on having built up credit for ONLY setting aside bylaws in favor of common sense. The LNC’s setting aside of the bylaws has so frequently — almost every time, in fact — been in the opposite direction from common sense that there’s no such credit balance to draw on. It’s not even a matter of “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile;” it’s more like “give them and inch and they’ll kick you in the nuts, take your wallet and piss in your beer.”
As a side thought… that pertains to electronic meetings and the right of non-members of the committee to observe…… and these issues also pertain to use of non-public email lists such as the one on the Audit Committee… Don’t they constitute an executive session?
If so shouldn’t they require a motion to take a conversation into non-public email list and shouldn’t that conversation be limited to the topic set forth in the motion and be for only a limited time period?
Don’t forget that there are a number of votes that take place between meetings. But this is the budget meeting, so it really needs to be in person.
The ByLaws require any committee with more than nine members to meet in person.
Personally, I believe that requiring the LNC to meet in person three (it used to be four!) times a year is a good thing. Having to debate in person adds value to the process. Allowing members to see the meeting or be present at it also gives a level of transparency that you can’t get with Skype.
Do you really believe that regular members of the party would be allowed to watch a video conference meeting?
Yes, it costs money to be on the LNC. That’s just politics as usual. I believe that I spent about $20-$25k (or more) just on LNC meetings over the six years I was on the committee. I drove to a number of the meetings, so my cost was probably less than that of other members.
The wasted time in the meetings is on reports that could be submitted in writing (most are) that do not need to be presented. If members came to the meeting prepared (another HUGE problem) then debate could take place on the issues and there would be less time wasted explaining things to people who can’t take the time to read what was sent to them.
Meetings used to be two plus days long. Then they were two. Then they were two, with members bugging out early. The members who can’t seem to figure out how to stay for the full meeting waste the time of others who want to stay and get things done.
Just my $.02…
You know.. if they had not spent $5000 to hire the Oregon Republican Party’s general counsel, Tyler Smith, in order to support the furtherance of an attempted coup in the Libertarian Party of Oregon…
Nah, they would have blown it on something else.
LOL! I get that there has to be some structure to any political party or faction, but to have the gall to beg for money because there’s some bylaw that says you can’t use Skype for your meetings? Oh I don’t think so.
Here layeth the late great Libertarian Party. It legislated itself to death.
The irony of a libertarian political party hampered by bureaucracy & arbitrary rules. This is what frustrates me about the LP: to hell with bylaws, use common sense!
I’ve actually pushed that on the LNC. The standing interpretation of the bylaws is that we are not allowed to do business except by meeting in person or by email ballot, which takes weeks. Bylaws committee will hopefully take this up.
They’re saying the same thing I was thinking, have you never heard of Skype? Teleconfrences?
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