[GPCA-SGA-Votes] Discuss ID 156: Bylaws Amendment: Procedures for Recall

[Cynthia Santiago]

I am forwarding this email because apparently Mike Feinstein's emails are
not being sent to this list, despite him posting them to this list a couple
of hours ago, as you can see below.

Cynthia Santiago
Gardena, Los Angeles County


*From: *Mike Feinstein <mfeinstein at feinstein.org>
*Subject: **Re: [GPCA-SGA-Votes] Discuss ID 156: Bylaws Amendment:
Procedures for Recall*
*Date: *March 30, 2018 at 10:05:22 AM PDT
*To: *GPCA Discussion List for SGA Votes <gpca-votes at sfgreens.org>

Dear Greens

This is thinly veiled attempt to further the internal faction fight in our
state party, to make it easier to get eliminate candidates elected under
proportional representation, who do not agree with the current Coordinating
Committee majority and those who support them.

Background

Current recall procedures reserve the right to initiate and approve recall
petitions to county councils, rather than county organizations themselves.
This is an obstacle to fuller participation in party governance by the
GPCA, as defined in Bylaw 3-1.


This is not true.  Actually County Councils are the one party of party
governance that is subject to all registered Greens, because any registered
Greens can run and when the race is contested, any Green can vote.   In
other words, County Council elections are the one place open to the fullest
participation in the GPCA.

In addition to promoting clarity by complying with Bylaws 4-1 and 4-4,
revising this provision would also ensure that the GPCA’s own procedures
for encouraging oversight and good governance of the party organization are
more consistent with two of the party’s 10 Key Values: decentralization and
grassroots democracy.


This is stated without substantiation.

Actually this proposal centralizes power, by moving it away from the county
parties who represent a broad base of Greens around the state, to a
potentially much smaller group of people who may happen to attend an
in-person GA at any given point in time (as explained below).

This proposal also removes an inconsistency found elsewhere in the bylaws
regarding the duties and responsibilities of both the General Assembly (GA)
and Standing General Assembly (SGA) (cf., GPCA Bylaw 7-6.2(g)).


Actually this text confuses the issues, as explained below.


Proposal

That GPCA Bylaw Article 8-5.2 be amended as follows:

That Article 8-5.2 be amended from its current text:

8-5.2 A Recall Petition must contain the written basis for removal, be
approved by County Councils representing 35% of the total number of General
Assembly delegate seats, and must be received by the Coordinating Committee
before it can be forwarded to the General Assembly for a vote. The written
basis for recall must be based upon substantial malperformance of the
duties of the Coordinating Committee as defined in these Bylaws.


Again, the reason that this rule is based upon County Councils, is that the
county parties are elected bodies on the county level and hence are the
building blocks of the state party. County Councils are also places where
considered discussion can occur on such a serious issues. The way the new
rule is written, it just become a petition drive effort, as described below.


to read as follows:

8-5.2 A Recall Petition must contain the written basis for removal, be
approved by 35% of the total number of General Assembly or Standing General
Assembly delegates,


I don’t know if this text was submitted to the GPCA Bylaws Committee for
review as required under GPCA Bylaws, but this text now entirely confuses
the process and can produce unintended consequence - and given that, the
Bylaws Committee had a responsibility to identify that to the sponsor and
send it back for more work, and the Bylaws Committee failed us.

The current text  "A Recall Petition must contain the written basis for
removal, be approved by County Councils representing 35% of the total
number of General Assembly delegate seats “

is based upon the total number of General Assembly DELEGATE SEATS, because
that is a number defined in the party bylaw by a given formula

7-1.2 The total number of delegates and the number of delegates per county
shall be the total of two sums:

7-1.2(a) Each active County Organization shall have at least one delegate
seat, for a total of 58 if County Organizations are active in all of
California's counties.

7-1.2(b) Each active County Organization shall have an additional number of
delegates seats out of an additional 100 seats, equal to its percentage of
registered Greens from within the county, compared to the total number of
registered Greens in all counties, with a minimum of 1% required for one
seat, times 100.


By trying to change this to

"A Recall Petition must contain the written basis for removal, be approved
by 35% of the total number of General Assembly or Standing General Assembly
delegates”

creates several problems.

The first is that it creates an uncertain number, by changing the
definition from SEATS to DELEGATES. The number of SGA DELEGATES can change
from time to time during the course of a year , so the number of delegates
needed to support a recall petition would change!  Furthermore this rule
doesn’t state at what time that number of delegates is defined. This is
sloppy work on behalf of the sponsors (unless it was intentional) and the
GPCA Bylaws Committee needed to have caught this and sent it back for
correction.

In fact this rule would then incentive county parties to play games with
how many people are their appointed SGA delegates at any one time, in order
to affect the total number needed for such a recall petition.

Second, by introducing " General Assembly or Standing General Assembly
DELEGATES” instead of SEATS, this is sly backdoor method to change the
entire threshold for a recall, from a 35% of a large number of defined
seats, to 35% of a smaller number of random people who show up at a General
Assembly.

So now under this proposal, all that has to happen is that we have a
modestly attended GA in one part of the state, where Greens from another
part of the state can’t easily attend, and then 35% of that MUCH SMALLER
number of delegates in attendance (compared to the defined number of SEATS)
can move a recall process ahead. It could even theoretically happen late on
a Sunday afternoon at a GA, when only a small people were left, that
arguably could say 35% of those people remaining would be enough to start a
recall!

Under the current GPCA rules, recalls are NOT mean to be easy.  The reason
for this is that our CC elections are held under proportional
representation, to ensure diverse representation, including of minority
factions in the party.

The recall rule is not supposed to be used for internal party faction
fights, but instead is meant to be in place in that rare case where it is
abundantly obvious to a very large number of Greens that something must be
done.

Third, with County Councils, there is a clear APPROVAL PROCESS where County
Councils take a vote and have minutes. Now what is going to happen? Now
there is no ‘approval process’ in place.  Are we supposed to have a
change.org petition going around? Who is going to verify who supported such
a petition?  There is nothing in this rule that describes such a process -
again another reason that it should have been sent back by the GPCA Bylaws
Committee for more work. In fact as is, this proposal is not actually
implementable and is thus infirm.

In sum, this proposal is poorly written, not implementable as written, and
is a thinly-veiled effort to aid faction fighting.  Really quite sad that
something like this has advanced this far.

For all of these reasons, I am voting no

Mike Feinstein
SGA Delegate
GPLAC
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